


Link Marks

by shaenie



Category: Leverage
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BDSM, Blood Drinking, F/M, Longer than I expected, M/M, Mental Link, More plot than I expected, Multi, Pegging, Piercing, Sophie/Nate background, Spanking, Vampire Hunters, Vampires, WIP, more than canon level violence, non-graphic mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 06:57:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 46
Words: 180,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7090540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the first mark manifests, sitting right on the topmost rib on his left side, an elegant black, peach, and purple swirl of color that is just an abstract and intricate melange of color and shape, he’s already twenty-three, and in the Rangers, good at his job, the best, and completely at a loss as to what it means. There are no drunken shenanigans in the previous six months to explain it, and besides that, it doesn’t really look like a tattoo. He isn’t sure what it looks like, exactly. It’s abstract, no pattern or symbol to it. He tries to wash it off, half-thinking it’s some kind of joke, but it doesn’t wash and it doesn’t eventually wear off. And he’s certain there is some meaning to it, a feeling he can’t explain to himself, and which he never mentions to anyone else, which, if he had really thought it was some sort of practical joke one of the other guys had pulled on him, he surely would have. He has no idea why, but the urge to keep it to himself is strong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Parker/Hardison/Eliot vampire hunters threesome with bonus mental links that nobody probably needs, but that I am apparently going to write anyway. This was meant to be short and porny, but I can't say I'm surprised it didn't work out that way for me. I don't normally do WIP's, but my personal life has been a disaster for the last year and I haven't been doing any writing at all (and being able to write is a pretty effective way to determine when I'm doing better), and I feel like I need to get this out there, both because I feel obligated to finish things when I know other people are waiting, and because I could use the confidence boost that comments and kudos and other forms of encouragement will give me as I go along.

Eliot doesn’t show his marks.

Plural.

It comes on him late, and that’s something to be grateful for. When the first mark manifests, sitting right on the topmost rib on his left side, an elegant black, peach, and purple swirl of color that is just an abstract and intricate melange of color and shape, he’s already twenty-three, and in the Rangers, good at his job, the best, and completely at a loss as to what it means. There are no drunken shenanigans in the previous six months to explain it, and besides that, it doesn’t really look like a tattoo. He isn’t sure what it looks like, exactly. It’s abstract, no pattern or symbol to it. He tries to wash it off, half-thinking it’s some kind of joke, but it doesn’t wash and it doesn’t eventually wear off. And he’s certain there is some meaning to it, a feeling he can’t explain to himself, and which he never mentions to anyone else, which, if he had really thought it was some sort of practical joke one of the other guys had pulled on him, he surely would have. He has no idea why, but the urge to keep it to himself is strong. He ignores it for weeks. He’s a soldier, content to be that and nothing more. 

Except. He can’t ignore that he’s faster, that he can see better in the dark, that he is stronger than he should be. He tells himself that he’s just getting better at his job. 

So his first blood meal, when it happens, happens on the job, and is shocking in its relative simplicity. 

He remembers it later only in snatches and blurs, a routine hand to hand fight with an enemy combatant, Eliot more than his equal, and when the man goes down Eliot stares at him lying at his feet, blood pouring from the knife wound on his shoulder, and the craving is suddenly a driving necessity. He remembers the feel of his teeth against his lower lip, longer, sharper, and he remembers falling to his knees over the man, and he doesn’t remember the feel of _biting_ , but he does remember the hot spurt of blood in his mouth satisfying something deeply coiled around the base of his brain, remembers the way his senses had heightened and clarified, so that by the time the rest of his team has started to regroup, he can hear them on the headset, calling his codename, and is able to pull back, stop. He remembers staring at the man, still breathing, if a little pale looking, and then, as if by instinct, remembers leaning down to lave his tongue against the punctures visible above the knife wound, which dwindle and vanish before his eyes.

He has never been a talkative one, so the way he is reeling when he rejoins his unit isn’t immediately obvious behind his usual laconic front, and he had taken the time to clean the blood from his mouth with a sterile alcohol wipe, taken from the pocket where he keeps emergency medical supplies, which smells so strong to his heightened sense of scent that he nearly loses his first feeding to an almost apocalyptic gag reflex. He grimly keeps it down and keeps his head down, while myths and half-forgotten speculations of long ago writers jumble around in his head as he tries to get himself under control.

It’s harder because he’s abruptly aware of the smell of all the blood, both the blood of the enemy and the blood of his fellow soldiers pulsing at their throats and wrists, though that is all he is. Aware. He doesn’t feel any kind of blood lust or craving, doesn’t want to hurt his men, doesn’t feel the need for more blood. 

His teeth have returned to normal, had done so even as he’d licked away the marks on his victim’s chest.

Eliot is generally a calm man, a man of action and reaction, the discipline of the Rangers removing the need for any kind of deep contemplation of what he does, but this shakes him to his core.


	2. Chapter 2

He takes his first leave in six years a week after it happens, and does his best to run intel and research on what he is becoming, what he maybe has always been. The information is scanty and piecemeal, published only in the kinds of newspapers you buy at the checkout line at the grocery store, but the highest quality ones, not the ones with the really whacked out conspiracy theories -- no self respecting science journal would publish a paper about the apparent existence of myths and legends, after all -- but he tracks down a reporter who had written an article on the apparent mind-control abilities of… of the only thing Eliot can think of that he might be -- the kind that live in the dark, not the kind that walk under the sun like Eliot, he can find nothing on that at all -- and ironically uses the methods she had documented in her article to draw from her all kinds of other information, and it’s easy. 

He follows her to her apartment and waits until she is asleep, breaks in with skills the Rangers have fostered in him, and wakes her with a thin trickle of blood from his own wrist eased between slightly sleep-parted lips. She’s as tractable as a doll, and confirms all that she had written, along with things she only suspects. Her source, nameless, had been a nightwalking blood drinker, what popular literature would have termed a vampire, a word Eliot still can’t bring himself to apply to himself, who had come to her. No, she doesn’t know his name or where to find him. No, she doesn’t know why he had told all that he had told, though she speculates -- after some experimentation from Eliot that gives her the ability to speculate rather than just answering yes or no questions, and he becomes aware during this experimentation that he can feel the flutter of her consciousness sort of… captured within his mind, and that he can hold her tight and get her to do nearly anything, or hold her loosely and talk almost as people talk under sodium pentothal -- that the nameless nightwalker had been looking to find more of his kind.

He doesn’t learn much about himself except for the mark, _link marks_ , she calls them, which are created when a vampire creates another, and which give both of those marked supernatural awareness of one another, not mind control, but something less invasive, a general sense of well being, the ability to find each other if they’re separated, the ability to heal each other with their own blood, and -- she speculates -- more that the nightwalker had not been willing to share with her.

When he asks her about spontaneously appearing marks, she looks at him blankly, no recognition, no knowledge, and he clamps down on his frustration and eases her back to sleep with the understanding that she won’t remember anything at all. 

The last thing he gets from her is his second blood meal, carefully taken from the bend of her elbow while she sleeps and healed into clean skin by his saliva. He takes only a little, but her blood is cleaner or sharper than the blood of the enemy soldier he had drunk from before, and his heightened senses (which had been starting to slowly fade back into something that Eliot decides to call his baseline, even though that baseline is significantly higher than what it had been before the mark had appeared on his body) are a lot stronger this time, strong enough that he has to spend some time in the sleeping woman’s apartment adjusting to them to keep from being swept up in the many scents in the air and the feel of her bedclothes under his fingertips and the almost-daylight bright vision that washes through him. 

He investigates several other tenuous sources, but they all turn out to be yellow journalism along the lines of _Bat Boy Lives_ and _Elvis Abducted by Aliens_.

The other searches he does are all in folklore and books of mythology and the occult, which bring back multiple myths and legends and wild speculations, none of which seem to apply to Eliot at all. Feeling stupid, but unwilling to chance missing anything, he reads all the popular vampire fiction he can get his hands on as well, but it’s all wrong. 

He still eats, he still has a heartbeat, he still breathes. He can’t shapeshift and isn’t even sure how to go about attempting such a thing, but is still pretty sure. The only thing is the mark itself and the increases in things like his heightened senses, strength, and speed. Lacking other information and unwilling to use his whatever these abilities are to quietly fleece people who will never remember it to support himself, he goes back to the Rangers.

At his first mandatory physical, the doctor notes the mark, making a wry joke about drunken visits to the tattoo parlor, and Eliot eases the memory of the mark out of the man’s mind before he gets the chance to note it in his file. He does it by instinct, eye contact only, no blood exchanged. He just catches the man in his gaze and holds his eyes, feeling that same kind of fluttering of consciousness he’d felt from the woman reporter, but weaker, and just… just smudges away that one particular image, that moment. It leaves the doctor blinking down in bemused distraction for several seconds, but he picks back up with the rest of the physical after only a few seconds.

The ease of it makes Eliot faintly uneasy, but since he doubts he’ll have much reason to use it, he lets the uneasiness go and is merely grateful to keep the mark out of his file.


	3. Chapter 3

Life doesn’t change much. The need for blood only rears occasionally, and Eliot is a Ranger. He has the training and the skills to take care of it when it happens, and he doesn’t need much, though the slow decline of his heightened senses is what typically alerts him that he’s going to need blood soon. Usually he feeds on missions, on a wounded opponent, and he has plenty of opportunity. 

When the need for someone to go in solo and disable a guard or two comes up, that has always been Eliot’s job, so nothing really changes.

He takes care to appear human normal during missions, but he was already one of the best, and being… whatever he is now only makes him better.

He’s twenty-five when he is bumped into black-ops, and twenty-six when he makes the final, potentially fatal decision that he doesn’t want to do what black-ops soldiers do. It’s only potentially fatal because Eliot understands the consequences of trying to simply not re-up when his tour ends, and instead vanishes into the mercenary underground in a small South African country whose President Eliot was supposed to kill.

He already lives off the blood of others. He doesn’t want to kill, although he has killed during his time in the service. But all of that had been life or death, he had been a retrieval specialist, not an assassin, and those times had been kill or be killed. 

Now he is so much stronger and faster than a normal human that the idea of a fair fight is ludicrous, and black ops is just another name for government hit squads. He doesn’t want that, and knows they won’t let him go, so he uses his abilities to go to ground instead.

Smarter, better, if he could make himself disappear from their memories and he could do it, it would be a little time-consuming, but it could be done, but there would still be files, computer and hard copy, and Eliot doesn’t have the patience or the stomach to play the government hit man while he painstakingly erases himself from the Military collective consciousness.

He makes a quiet kind of name for himself as professional muscle, and his unwillingness to kill costs him some work, but surprises him by giving him a reputation that seems like it slides sideways into notoriety because of it.


	4. Chapter 4

He is twenty-eight when his second mark manifests along the arch of his right foot, a teal spiral limned with a faint tracery of gold with a spot of blood red in the precise center. He isn’t sure how long it’s actually been there when he’s sliding on his sock one day and sees it there. He doesn’t actually pay that much attention to his feet as a rule, not when showering and pulling on socks and shoes usually happens before dawn. He stares at it in a kind of baffled shock, and then has to go into the bathroom and yank up his shirt to make sure the mark on his ribs is still there. It is, just as elegant and swooping as it had been the first time he’d seen it.

Eventually he decides it doesn’t really matter. He has nowhere to go to get information on what a second link mark might mean. He has no intention of tracking down any others of his kind, neither the nightwalkers or the ones like him, that just… evolve into it, and he definitely doesn’t have any intention of seeking out the… the potential two that might have marks matching his own. Neither mark is in a glaringly obvious place, so he ignores them.

When he takes someone to bed, he doesn’t try to hide them, exactly, he just says they’re tattoos, if he’s asked, which is rarely, and mostly there isn’t enough light to see them at all.


	5. Chapter 5

Eliot is absolutely not looking for anything at all when he sees Parker’s mark. It’s their third job, and he doesn’t expect her to jerk her shirt up over her head and do a quick change in an elevator, and even though he and Hardison both quickly turn their backs, it’s not quite quickly enough.

It’s a gold spiral, limned in blood red, with a teal circle in the precise center of the spiral, positioned just to the right side of her spine beneath her shoulder blade.

A jolt of something primitive and primal grips him, something that is equal parts yearning and terror, and he shoves both hands in his pockets to hide the fact that they’re balled into fists to keep them from shaking, and his belly sinks down to his boots, because he’s just getting the hang of this thing, this team, these people, and it’s the first time in a long time that he’s felt… satisfied with what he’s doing. Like he’d felt in the Rangers. Like he was one of the good guys.

The job goes off without a hitch, this team is a _fit_ , and Eliot can’t have it.

He packs to leave that night, to vanish back into the underworld of hired muscle, and then he takes off his shoe and sock and looks at the mark.

He’s only got a quick glance at hers, but Eliot is quick with details, and it’s a precise duplicate of his, with the colors reversed.

Does that mean something? He has touched Parker before, hands brushing, common touches, so he assumes that as long as he doesn’t _touch_ her actual mark with his bare skin -- and though he barely knows Parker, he does know her well enough to think that him touching her bare skin in that precise spot would be an extremely good way for him to get stabbed -- so. And it may not even be that simple. A touch might not matter. He might have to actually drink her blood, which he is never going to do. So.

So it doesn’t matter. He has to not touch her mark and make sure she doesn’t touch his mark (or even see it, that would be better), and keep his blood meals quiet, which he already has a lot of practice at.

He doesn’t want to want to know, but the knowledge burns at him. That she could be like him. But not enough to reveal himself when her mark could be nothing but a fluke, maybe all the ones like him have the exact same kinds of marks (though he knows from the reporter that each mark is supposed to be unique, shared only by the vampire and his or her chosen scion). 

It doesn’t necessarily work the same with whatever Eliot is, doesn’t have to mean anything, and he doesn’t want that possibility of connection, doesn’t want to be able to pick up thoughts or feelings, doesn’t want to always know when someone is near or far or what direction they are in, doesn’t want to know any of the other dozen things the link marks might do. He feels confident that he doesn’t want any of those things, and furthermore, he’s almost sure that _Parker_ wouldn’t want them either.

So.

He goes on another job, and another. Parker isn’t touchy-feely anyway, much like Eliot himself, and she’s so… so _Parker_. He likes her, and finds her funny and oddly endearing in her extreme and profound weirdness, and she’s definitely a babe, but there isn’t anything there other than appreciation for her professionally and a kind of awe that she’s managed to get through life thus far without any of that amazing… _otherness_ (he can’t think of a better word) somehow getting worn off.

He makes it work because he’s… addicted, or something, to the high of the heists for righteous reasons. 

And the one time they decide to all walk away, it doesn’t take. It isn’t even a question.

Eliot takes a single solo job as muscle, and it’s like wearing a suit that has been hanging in the closet too long, and doesn’t quite fit anymore. When Nate calls, he goes, and he doesn’t lie to himself that he isn’t _glad_ to be going.


	6. Chapter 6

The job is like coming home, the team is like coming home, and Eliot feels stupid, depending on people is stupid, but he can’t help it. He’s going to be stupid, and he knows it.

And then the Mark Howorth job happens. It doesn’t take them long to figure out that Jed Rucker, the MMA fight promoter, had somehow drugged Mark during the fight, but it doesn’t change the fact that Mark is never going to fight again.

The job gets complicated. And then more complicated. And Rucker pings their con via the ‘good old boy’ network, something none of them could have ever anticipated. The threats to Mark and his family are credible enough from the bastard that Eliot is willing to risk getting in the ring, though it strips him down to shorts and shows off both his marks, but the team will be a fair distance away, only Nate close enough to see, and Eliot can remember to keep his left arm down and his right foot tucked under, and it’s a risk, but he’s so damned pissed, and when Parker (Parker can be as much of an evil genius as Nate at times) almost tentatively suggests a way that they can set Rucker up and pull it out of the fire, Eliot doesn’t hesitate.

The end result of that job is particularly satisfying.

They stage a virus quarantine at a hospital, they expose a slimeball of an investment banker, they destroy a truly hideous television personality, they expose a company selling tainted food, a dozen other jobs, they do good work, they fit. 

It’s as good as the Rangers had been.

And then, when Sophie demands a vacation, Eliot sees Hardison’s mark.


	7. Chapter 7

Sophie and Parker are shopping -- Eliot thinks Sophie is trying to get Parker interested in _girl_ things, and smirkingly doubts she’s going to get a lot of luck with that -- and Nate is playing pool in the hotel bar (they’re in Cancun, because why should they not be, and the only downside is that Eliot only goes out to swim at night when no one else from the team is there to see him in just swim trunks), and Eliot heckles Hardison away from his computer and into the supremely well-equipped gym because Eliot won’t always be there, and Hardison has enough natural grace and strength to at least pick up the basics.

“I’m not lifting weights,” Hardison says. “I should be leveling my mage, and if I am not leveling my mage, then I am definitely not lifting weights.”

“World of Warcraft is not a valid training method,” Eliot says, amused, and leads Hardison, grumbling, down to the far end of the gym, where the floor is matted for yoga and a couple of different classes in martial arts the hotel offers, as well as something called “zumba,” that both horrifies and intrigues Eliot the one time he’s lifting while it’s going on. 

This isn’t the first time they’ve worked out together, but it’s always been about how to block and how to fall and how to protect throat, chest and groin. This time Eliot wants to show Hardison some arm locks and pinches. Hardison has four inches on Eliot, and significant reach. If he can get even the basics drilled into him (and he’s willing to do it again and again, until it sticks), Hardison could be… not a fighter, not muscle, not really, but maybe good enough to protect himself from anyone who isn’t a professional if Eliot isn’t around to do it.

They go slow through elbow locks, Eliot twisting Hardison’s arm out and showing him where to hit to snap a wrist or elbow, has Hardison practice on him until he can tell Hardison is starting to get it. They stay at it for almost two hours, and at the tail end Hardison actually forgets to bitch about not leveling his mage when one of his nerve pinches actually works and sends Eliot to his knees.

“All right,” Hardison says, wide-eyed, after he offers Eliot a hand up.

“All right, what?” Eliot asks.

“All right, this can be a thing. We can do this as a thing. Regularly. Not the rough stuff, I’m never going to be in your league and we both know it, but the… the…” He stammers to an inelegant halt. “What is this called?”

“This is called dirty pool,” Eliot says, smirking. “It’s called using what you’ve got, which is reach and height and long legs that will let you take out a knee without having to get close up and personal. It’s a little of this and a little of that. The nerve pinches are all stuff I learned in the Army.”

“Dirty pool,” Hardison says, and grins. “Sounds good.” He lifts the hem of his t-shirt and uses it to wipe the sweat off his face. “I’m in.”

But Eliot barely hears it because he can see and elegant black and purple and peach swooping curve right above Hardison’s left hip, where his workout pants have tugged down to hang on the sharp ridges of his hipbones.

It’s like Parker’s. Reversed. Eliot’s is a thick black swooping curve with a line of purple in the center and a thinner line of peach on top. Hardison’s is peach where Eliot’s is black and black where Eliot’s is purple and purple where Eliot’s is peach.

Eliot jerks his gaze away quickly, but not quickly enough.

Hardison glances down at his own mark, and then just looks at Eliot and shrugs. “I lost a bet with a bottle of tequila,” he says, and Eliot can almost smell the lie, something shifting in the sweaty pheromones Hardison is putting out.

“You don’t...” Eliot says a little roughly, pauses to swallow and moisten his throat, and then continues, “You don’t remember getting it?” He tries for lightness, but isn’t sure he makes it.

A vertical line appears between Hardison’s brows. Slowly, he says. “No. I just woke up one morning with it there.” He doesn’t mention the tequila again, and the shifty smell fades out of the tang of his sweat. He shrugs with one shoulder.

In a burst of epiphany, Eliot understands that Hardison has yet to experience his first blood meal. He isn’t exposed to blood on a regular basis the way that Eliot is, and the way that sometimes even Parker might be, and so he has none of the extras that go along with the mark. No, not _none_ of the extras. Eliot is betting he is faster than he realizes, has excellent night vision, and has already noted that Hardison is unusually strong for as lean as he is. He wonders if Hardison even realizes, and then is almost sure he doesn’t.

He feels that same kind of primitive and primal drag that he’d felt when he’d first seen Parker’s mark, and covers it by using his blandest soldier face.

It doesn’t change anything. Hardison is still Hardison, still needs training, and Eliot might wish for Hardison to take his first drink of blood and gain the physical advantages that accompany it, just for Hardison’s safety, his ability to handle potential violence at any time that Eliot can’t be with him, but still. It changes nothing.

He likes Hardison just like he likes Parker, admiration for their professional skills and an unexpected kind of sympatico in their senses of humor, but he doesn’t want a link mark activated between them. Doesn’t want to know anything he can’t parse from Hardison’s words, body language, expression, and scent.

But he can’t help wondering about the odds. He doesn’t put any kind of stock in fate or destiny, but he is equally scornful of coincidence, and the confluence of these two specific people in his life, in his _team_ , as his… his _friends_ for lack of a better term, seems outrageously unlikely.

Parker is one thing, and could be a fluke, but Parker _and_ Hardison is something else. 

The odds are literally astronomical. That he knows them both.

Hardison says, “Let’s go see if Sophie survived her shopping trip with Parker.”

Eliot gives the slow blink that is the only response he is capable of giving. And then he surprises himself, hearing his voice come out slow and even and a little careless: “I need a shower. You can go back to leveling your mage, but if you want to do this, I want a commitment.”

Hardison arches his brows in question.

“Every other day at least. It should be every day, but I know your workload.” He is still staggeringly impressed with how steady he sounds.

Hardison cocks his head. “Parker is getting better with some of the computer stuff,” he says thoughtfully. “Nothing fancy, but low security stuff, and she could do more if she practiced.” Hardison’s expression brightens. “We should teach Parker dirty pool, too!” 

“Parker actually has a little training, but if she’s interested, I’m game.” Eliot’s heart is thudding in his ears.

Hardison holds out a hand for a fist bump, and Eliot barely hesitates. He’s fist-bumped Hardison a hundred times. They aren’t going to spontaneously link.

“Now if I could just get the two of you to play World of Warcraft,” Hardison says mournfully as they exit the gym and take the stairs back to their floor.

“Never going to happen,” Spencer says, and is surprised that his smirk is genuine. He still feels like he’s reeling in his head, but.

It hadn’t mattered with Parker. He had been careful. He’ll just have to be a little _more_ careful.


	8. Chapter 8

The suite has five bedrooms, so they’re both equally surprised at the exact same time when they walk into the great room, which includes living and dining areas, and see what looks like a tsunami of clothes have exploded over the couches, draped over the massive T.V., hanging from the curtain rods, with some still in bags that seem to be leaning against every surface.

“Look at this!” Parker chirps excitedly, and spins, sending the long, layered peasant skirt she’s wearing whirling in an oddly elegant circle. “I paid for this!”

She’s wearing a peasant blouse a shade or two lighter than the skirt, and she looks so un-Parker-ish that Eliot and Hardison both just stand there and blink at her. She frowns, pale brows drawn down. “You don’t like it? Sophie said it was perfect!”

“You look great,” Hardison says, recovering first, giving her a broad grin. “I hardly recognize you.”

Parker looks at Eliot. “Very nice,” he says, though secretly he kind of hates it. He likes Parker in Parker clothes. Then he repeats, “You look great,” because his brain is hung up on the fact that he has any preference at all as to what Parker wears.

Parker peers at the two of them. “You’re all sweaty.”

“Eliot is teaching me dirty pool. You can learn, too,” Hardison says.

Parker frowns. “Isn’t there just one kind of pool? How do you get all sweaty practicing to cheat at pool.” She looks kind of intrigued.

“Dirty pool is a euphemism for dirty fighting,” Eliot says.

“Hardison was fighting?” Parker asks, looking a little crestfallen. “And you didn’t let me watch?”

“You can watch tomorrow,” Hardison says indulgently, and casually flips a lock of blond hair behind her ear. “You can even join in.”

Parker beams.

Sophie sweeps into the room in a red sari, looking elegant and irritated at the same time. “We’re going to be using this room to try things on,” she states flatly.

Hardison holds up his hands in a peacekeeping gesture. “I’ve got my laptop and wi-fi in my room. Let me know when it’s safe to come out.”

“I need a shower,” Eliot says. “After that, I’m going to be hungry. So if you aren’t decent in thirty minutes, you’re going to have an audience.”

Sophie huffs, but doesn’t argue. She takes Parker by the wrist, a gesture that makes Eliot feel like bristling on Parker’s behalf, and tugs her toward one of the back bedrooms.

Eliot takes a long, hot shower and does his best not to think about the marks or the coincidence or anything remotely sexual about his two team mates, which is something he hadn’t had a problem with before he’d seen Hardison’s mark, not even after seeing Parker’s, because he had barely known Parker then, and that had been before her craziness had become endearing rather than alarming, and he’s never thought about any of them that way because they are his team, and you don’t fuck around with what works, and this works. It works better than he deserves, and he doesn’t want it to change, doesn’t want it to get weird, doesn’t want to wonder what a working link mark might feel like.

Damn it.

He cranks the water to cold and stands under it until he isn’t thinking about anything but getting warm, and then turns it off and gets out of the shower.

When he goes back out into the main room -- bracing himself against any casual nudity, but unwilling to be shunted into his bedroom to brood -- most of the clothes have gone away and Parker is sitting cross-legged on the couch, holding half a cantaloupe and a spoon. Hardison is hooking his computer up to the giant T.V. with a variety of cables, muttering under his breath about HDMI compatibility supposedly being standard with this model.

Nate and Sophie are nowhere to be seen.

Eliot cocks his head at Parker, who answers the question without having it asked. “Sophie wanted to go to the ballet. Nate… also wanted to go to the ballet?” She sounds a little unsure about that last part.

Hardison chuckles. “Nate wanted to shut Sophie up about her new evening gown and is taking one for the team.”

Parker is wearing a tank top and capri pants, which still aren’t really in Parker style, but are closer than what she’d been wearing earlier.

“So what are you doing to the T.V.?” Eliot asks, and thinks about cooking -- the hotel is four star and when Eliot had asked to have the fridge stocked with a carefully prepared assortment of things he can make into meals that he’s sure everyone on the team likes, they had only asked him if he wanted any of it frozen -- but ultimately dismisses it for the room service menu.

“I’ve got a video,” Hardison says, with an audible grin in his voice. “A special something I’ve been putting together for a while.”

This is so typically a Hardison thing to do that Eliot doesn’t even question it. The last video he had made had all been of Parker swan diving off of high buildings along with a soundtrack featuring the carefully choreographed screams of birds of prey, all different species, somehow timed and blended so seamlessly that it had almost been a musical accompaniment. The one before that one, shared only between the three of them, had been a mix-up of Sophie’s acting gigs, actual acting jobs, not grifting, which had been so hilariously bad that the three of them had had to stop it three times to laugh themselves out before starting again.

The one of Nate is nothing but a series of quotes, all beginning with, “Let’s go steal…” and ending in a variety of absurdities, and admittedly they had all more or less worked out, but is demonstrative of how much Nate likes the dramatic pronouncement. Now Nate uses the phrase at the start of almost every job, and they all grin and mock, but it sort of feels like a talismanic event at this point.

The fact that there is a tape of all of them except Hardison and Eliot at this point doesn’t even occur to Eliot as he orders from room service for all three of them while Hardison continues to wire his laptop to the T.V.

“Should we wait for Nate and Sophie for this?” Parker asks, spooning dainty bites of cantaloupe into her mouth as she watches Hardison.

Hardison shrugs. “This one is good for multiple viewings; I’ll show it to them tomorrow.” Then he makes a triumphant noise, and the T.V. abruptly shows them a mirror image of Hardison’s laptop screen. 

Hardison highlights a file, grabs the remote and knocks the volume of the T.V. up a few notches, and then double clicks the file. 

Low, classical music plays for several beats, and Eliot sits down on one side of Parker, prepared to be amused. Hardison scrambles back from the tangle of electronics and flops onto the couch on the other side of Parker.

The video resolves itself into Eliot, dressed in chef’s whites, apparently taken clandestinely at that fucking mobster wedding job, then in a button up shirt, hair tied back, wearing glasses, from the job where they’d tried and failed to run a short con on Nate’s ex-wife, and then Eliot in a tuxedo, blending into a crowd of other over-dressed men and women, the music just a flew low bars of something bland and classical, and then the screen fades to black and the opening bars of _Kung Fu Fighting_ by Carl Douglas starts, and that’s the first moment that Eliot starts to feel a twinge of concern. 

Then it’s a superbly timed montage of Eliot fighting, synced perfectly with the music, and Eliot blinks and realizes that Hardison would have had to have hacked a lot of security footage to put together this little production, and also that there may have been… probably were… going to be some sort of outward signs of his abilities.

He half-watches the video and half-watches Parker and Hardison from the edge of his vision, tension singing in his blood even as he keeps his body deliberately relaxed on the couch, and some of it is a little blurry -- Eliot’s speed -- but neither of them seem to notice it. They are both completely absorbed in the footage, wincing when Eliot does something particularly painful to an opponent, occasionally gasping at some particularly brutal move, but neither of them seem to suspect anything is awry, so in spite of himself, Eliot feels himself start to relax, turning more of his attention to the T.V. and the hacker-nerd-genius _Kung Fu Fighting_ mash up of Eliot’s various violent adventures.

He doesn’t know how Hardison got footage from the MMA match. It isn’t distant rink footage either, but close in, tight, and Eliot, with a sinking feeling in his guts, shifts his attention almost entirely to Parker and Hardison, who are watching as avidly as if they hadn’t been there to see the whole thing to begin with. 

The footage pans in and out, so it is maybe security footage, but the real problem, the potential for problems, anyway, comes when the footage is panned in close, Eliot and his opponent becoming gigantic on the suites enormous T.V. and while Eliot had been careful to use his body to conceal the link marks between rounds, there is simply no way to hide them while he is grappling with an opponent in nothing but a pair of shorts. 

“The view of this fight is a _lot_ better on an HDTV this size,” Hardison says, a smile in his voice, his eyes fixed on the screen.

Parker stiffens first. On the screen, Eliot has his opponent in a leg lock, and the top of his right foot is clearly visible, the mark on the screen magnified by the size of the T.V. and the high definition video. She says nothing, just continues to watch, but Eliot can smell the spike of adrenaline in her system, and he knows she saw. He doesn’t know what she knows, or how much of a connection she’ll make, but it’s clear that she’s seen the mark well enough to compare it to her own and recognize the similarities.

Eliot hopes that will be all that the tape shows clearly -- there is a lot of grappling and kicking in MMA, and the mark that matches Hardison’s is at the top of his ribs, hidden almost completely when his arms are at his sides, visible only when he punches, and then only for an instant at a time, so it’s possible Hardison won’t get a look at it.

But Eliot’s opponent gets him in a backward twisting arm bar, dragging his left arm back and away from his side, and the mark is perfectly visible, undeniably similar to Hardison’s own, and Eliot figures that when he’d been putting the video together on his laptop, the screen had been small enough to show it only as a smudge, or he suspects this video would have never been completed.

Hardison jumps as if goosed, and then leans forward, though at that point he only gets about two seconds to look at the mark before Eliot breaks the arm bar and flips his opponent to the mat, hiding it again.

To Eliot’s surprise, Hardison doesn’t stop the video and flip back through it frame by frame to get a good look at the image, but then he feels how Parker feels next to him, rigid, and her scent reeks of some level of fear that seems close to panic. Hardison has noticed it, too, and gets up off his end of the couch and pauses the laptop, the image frozen on the screen one of Eliot with his hair hanging in his face and a feral expression twisting his features.

With a care and calm warmth that Eliot is sure he himself is not capable of, Hardison eases himself down next to Parker and takes her right hand.

The left is still holding half a cantaloupe. Eliot doesn’t know what happened to the spoon.

Parker’s fear-scent spikes for a moment, and then eases down when she realizes Hardison isn’t trying to hold her there, is just offering comfort. She takes a short breath, as though about to speak, and then doesn’t.

Hardison looks past her to Eliot. “Let me see it,” he says, a demand, but a careful one, couched in neutrality.

Eliot considers the merits of clinging to lost causes, and then just… doesn’t. They know. They probably don’t know everything he knows, but they know enough, and unless he’s going back underground, he can’t avoid this.

He leans forward and shucks his t-shirt all the way off, turns his left side toward Hardison, and raises his arm.

Parker hitches in another breath as though to speak, and then doesn’t.

“And the other one,” Hardison says.

Eliot is only wearing socks, no shoes, so he just tugs off his right sock and cocks his foot up onto the coffee table.

No one speaks for at least a minute, and Eliot eventually says, “I don’t know what it means that I have one for each of you.” It’s the truth, though a careful slant around the fact that he knows, in general, what the marks are supposed to be for.

Parker takes a breath, and this time actually does speak. “I have both, too. The colors are all mixed up, but.” She looks at Hardison, and gestures toward the mark at the top of Eliot’s ribs. “I have that one, too.”

Hardison, sounding calm and almost careless, says, “I have both of them, too. The colors are in a different order, but I have two.” 

Eliot blinks once, slowly, his mind almost a perfect blank. He had seen only one on each of them, and so had just assumed that he was the odd man out.

Hardison stands up and unbuttons and unzips his jeans and then shucks them down below his hipbones and shows them both the mark Eliot he had already seen, the swooping swirl of colors. He pauses for a long moment, then turns his back to them, and shucks his pants down a little more. The spiral is at the top of his right glute, identical to the one on Eliot’s foot, and the one that he’d seen briefly on Parker’s back, except the colors mixed up. 

Eliot realizes that both marks have three colors and that the spiral, at least, has each color in a different order on all three of them. Eliot’s is a teal spiral limned with a faint tracery of gold with a spot of blood red in the precise center. Parker’s had been a gold spiral, limned in blood red, with a teal circle in the center of the spiral. Hardison’s is blood red, limned in teal, with a gold circle in the center.

Hardison pulls up and re-fastens his jeans. “Can we see yours?” he asks Parker, with the somehow crystal clear conveyance that she can say no, and that would be fine. Eliot is once again sure that he wouldn’t be capable of that combination of precise tone and language and eye contact, the out that he’s giving her without having to tell her that she’s being given an out.

Parker hands Eliot her half a cantaloupe and shrugs out of her tank top. She’s wearing a bra (which is a little out of character for her), a filmy lavender confection of lace and silk that Eliot is instantly sure Sophie is responsible for. She turns to face the back of the couch, showing the spiral under her right shoulder blade, an inch or so from her spine.

When she turns back around, she looks down at her lap for a second, plucks nervously at the fabric of her bra, then sort of smirks with a twinkling of mischief chasing quickly across her features, and reaches around and unhooks it. The black, peach, and purple abstract swoop of color is curved around the bottom of her perfect left breast, again, the colors opposite of Eliot’s and Hardison’s, but otherwise a perfect match.

The doorbell to the suite rings, and they all jerk, and exchange dismayed and startled looks.

Parker jerks her tank top back on, stuffing the bra into the depths of the couch cushions, perhaps never to be seen again, and Eliot jerks his right sock on.

They had forgotten about room service.


	9. Chapter 9

Hardison answers the door, is jocular with the staff, tips outrageously, and wheels the cart into the room.

Eliot is hungry and it smells good, but it doesn’t seem quite right to just go from matching link marks to food without some kind of discussion of it first. And Hardison doesn’t know anything, really. Parker might know more, but she might not either. It’s not like she does any real wetwork. Eliot would have to do the telling, and he dreads the idea of it.

If they don’t know, either of them, the idea of saying “I drink human blood,” is tremendously daunting. He doesn’t, and has never, felt any real guilt about it, but the idea of evoking negative reactions from them is unexpectedly something he doesn’t want to have to do.

It’s Hardison again who asks the question, and without any expectation of information, as though he assumes they are all equally ignorant. “But what does it mean?”

Parker shifts and looks at Eliot, one brow raised very slightly in query, and Eliot feels a short burst of relief. She knows. Maybe not all that he knows, but she’s fed on human blood. “We should eat before it gets cold,” is all she says though, her voice modulated into tones of deliberate good cheer. “We can try to puzzle it all out after I’ve had more than half a cantaloupe. We should have time before Sophie and Nate get back. Doesn’t the ballet last forever?”

Hardison smirks at her words, though there is still a vertical line of puzzlement between his brows. But he knows how not to corner Parker, knows it better than Eliot ever would have guessed, so he wheels the tray over to the dining table and starts setting out plates.

They don’t talk while they eat. It’s a little weird. Meals tend to be full of jokes and mockery and trying to see if you can get one of your tablemates to do a spit-take, but the silence doesn’t feel precisely uncomfortable.

Charged, maybe, but there doesn’t seem to be any anxiety circulating among them.

Eliot’s lamb is seasoned to perfection, maybe better than he could do himself, and his squash medley is crisp and slathered in butter and garlic. Parker is eating a hearty serving of mushroom and chicken alfredo with apparent gusto. Hardison, the heathen, has a cheeseburger and fries.

When they finish eating, they stack the plates on the cart, moving around each other with easy familiarity, and Eliot wheels it into the hall and leaves it outside the door.

“So. This kind of talk should be with alcohol,” Parker chirps, and goes to investigate the cabinets.

“There are two bottles of a good Gewürztraminer in the fridge, along with a couple of Chteau Lafite Rothschild Pauillac in there if you prefer reds,” Eliot says.

“I like sort of sweet white wines best,” Parker says. “Which one should I drink?”

“The Gewürztraminer,” Eliot says immediately. “It’s spectacular.”

“I’m going to go with the red,” Hardison says. He looks at Eliot. “What should I bring you?”

“You think this is a bottle apiece conversation?” Eliot asks, only slightly amused, because he suspects Hardison is closer to right than Eliot likes.

Hardison shrugs one shoulder. “If we each have our own bottle, we’ll have plenty of time to talk without having to get up and open another.”

“I”ll have the Gewürztraminer,” Eliot says. “Do you need me to open it?”

Hardison rolls his eyes. “I have used a corkscrew before,” he says.

“On real cork?” Eliot asks.

Hardison looks shifty eyed.

“Nevermind, I can do it,” Parker says, and scampers into the kitchen. Eliot hears the fridge, hears a drawer or two open, and then, fairly quickly, hears the sound of three bottles of wine being uncorked, one right after the other. “Glasses, my hands are full of the expensive wine!” Parker calls.

Eliot passes her on her way out the kitchen door and fetches three crystal wine glasses. When he gets back into the living room, Parker has arranged all the couch cushions into a circle on the floor, set a bottle of wine by each pile of cushions, and Hardison is unhooking his laptop from the T.V. with much more dexterity and much less cursing than the hooking up had taken.

Eliot looks a question at him, and Hardison sighs. “They don’t really look that much like tattoos. I mean, if you see them, all you can think is ‘it must be a tattoo,’ because, like, what else could it be. Still, I don’t think it’s a good idea to let Nate and Sophie see yours on the big screen until we talk about what the hell it means. I can show them tomorrow on my laptop. You can’t get the same level of detail from the laptop as you can from a sixty inch HDTV, or I’d have noticed when I was putting the video together.”

Eliot nods, picks out a pile of cushions next to a bottle of Gewürztraminer and passes out wine glasses.

They pour in silence, then sip experimentally. Then both Parker and Hardison take bigger drinks, looking oddly similar, both of them with their brows arched high in surprise.

“Eliot always picks the wine,” Parker says, a demand.

“Agreed,” Hardison says, and tips his glass toward Eliot. “This is the best wine I’ve ever tasted. Don’t tell me how much it costs.”

Eliot smiles a little, something loosening in his chest at the way that it’s actually easy to do, not forced, but natural.

He imagines finding out he had matching link marks with Nate and Sophie and shudders at the very idea, but somehow, with the three of them, things aren’t tense. Weird, but not tense.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Eliot says. “My first mark, the swoopy one, appeared when I was twenty-three and in the Rangers.”

Hardison’s face scrunches a little, and then relaxes into amusement. “I was seven. You’re forty-two and I’m twenty-six, which makes it nineteen years ago for both of us. Parker?”

“Thirteen. Nineteen years ago,” she confirms.

“Oh my God, you guys are young,” Eliot says, feeling weird about thinking about a seven year old blood drinker, before remembering that Hardison isn’t a blood drinker. Not yet anyway.

“Okay, and the second when I was twenty-eight, fourteen years ago,” Eliot says.

“Twelve,” Hardison volunteers. “I gotta say, I’m pretty grateful for the fact that my pants hide both of mine. My Nana would have thrown a fit.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Eliot asks. “At seven, you didn’t think to tell anyone?”

Hardison is silent for at least a minute while he drains his glass and then refills it. Then he shrugs a little. “I knew it was secret. Or. Private, maybe. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly what I thought about it when I was seven, it was a long time ago, but I remember just understanding that I should keep it to myself.”

“Same,” Parker says. “Just a feeling. No good explanation. What about you?” She quirks an eyebrow at Eliot.

“Sort of the same. I was older and already a soldier, and I had some advantages you two didn’t have as kids. I could do some investigating.” He shakes his head. “No. What I did was interrogating.”

Parker drains her glass and fills it again. “Where did you find a source?”

“Tabloid,” Eliot admits. “High end like you used to be able to find, slanted toward the occult. The reporter claimed to have been approached and confided in by a vampire.”

He waits for a moment to let that sink it. Hardison’s eyebrows try to scale his forehead to his hairline, but Parker only looks a little startled.

“It was all different though. According to the article, this guy was dead and cold, no heartbeat, no breathing, unable to go out into the sun. The Bram Stoker version, mostly, though I don’t know about the crosses and holy water. He didn’t answer all of her questions.” Eliot drains his glass and pours another and then just holds it, waiting for one of them to ask _the_ question.

Hardison asks it. “How would a search for the mystery mark on your body lead you to a rag about vampires?” He sounds genuinely bewildered.

“Because I wasn’t seven, and I was a soldier. I knew my own body. When the mark manifested, my body changed. My senses got better. My reflexes got faster. I got stronger.” Eliot sips a mouthful of wine.

“But that could be any kind of magic -- because if we’re postulating the existence of vampires, we might as well postulate the same about witches. I mean, what made you decide to look at _vampires_?” Hardison is gazing at him, puzzled, but there is a kind of uneasiness under that puzzlement that Eliot thinks he understands.

“When I was seventeen I went out with a boy,” Parker says. Throwing a sideways glance at Eliot, her voice fairly easy, with only a tiny edge to it. “He was older, had connections with some people I wanted to go to work for, at least long enough to grab something I had my eye on. I went because I wanted an introduction to his family.” She sips at her wine, looking down at her glass for a long moment, and then looks up to meet Hardison’s eyes. “When I tried to ask for what I wanted, he told me we needed to talk about it someplace more private. We went to an old warehouse. He grabbed me and tried to wrestle me to the ground.” Her eyes flicker. “ But I was fast and strong, and he reeked of fear sweat and other things, but the important thing was the fear. He wasn’t scared of me. He was scared of getting caught. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was scared, and even then I had a lot of… talent. Acrobatically. I was fast and strong. I wasn’t afraid. I was mad. So when he tried to push me down again and started trying to get my shirt off, I stabbed him in the groin.” 

A faint smile touches her lips, and Eliot feels a wave of admiration for her that’s all tangled up with fondness over the fact that she can talk about attempted rape and feel smug about the fact that she’d stabbed her attacker in the place where his brain obviously resided. Eliot steals a glance at Hardison, and finds his mouth a little open, obviously both horrified and impressed, and Eliot feels a little more relaxed about his own fond feelings for Parker’s poetically just violence. 

“It might have ended there, but something happened.” She glances at Eliot, seems to like what she sees in his face, and then turns her full attention to Hardison. “I only remember the first time like… like a series of photos arranged in a timeline. I can’t remember deciding to do anything. I remember something at the back of my brain, like it was waking up. I don’t remember biting him, but I remember the way his blood felt on my tongue. I don’t remember deciding not to kill him, but I didn’t. I remember feeling how sharp my teeth were. I remember knowing that I could make the marks on his neck go away by licking them closed. Then I remember calling 911 on his cell phone and leaving it next to him. I remember washing the blood off of me with a water tap outside the warehouse. And I remember how bright the world was. How I could see and hear everything. I could smell everything. I remember being fast, leaving, like a shadow, like I could _be_ a shadow, and I remember running for hours, not getting tired or winded. I bought a bus ticket to a city with a rival crime family, and I remember waking up when the bus stopped, and feeling… good. Right. Like I had been missing something that I could live without if I had to, but that made everything super more satisfying if I had it.”

She drains her glass again, watching Hardison over the rim as she swallows. Hardison is staring at her, his mouth a little ajar, looking like he is mesmerized by everything she’d said, but also like he wants to be repulsed by it, so his face is a rapid metronome of conflicting expressions. He swallows convulsively, opens his mouth as though to speak, and then raises his wine glass to his lips again.

Parker looks at Eliot. “I assume it was something more combat related for you?” she asks.

“Yeah. But it was a lot like you said. I remember bits and pieces of it. And that’s why I started with vampires,” he says, to Hardison. “After the first time, after what I did, vampires was the most logical place to start looking. I took a leave and found the article. I looked up the reporter that wrote it, and I persuaded her to talk to me about it. She didn’t know anything about living, breathing, daywalking vampires, but she knew about the link marks. When a vampire makes another vampire, they both gain a mark. The same mark. Some kind of link comes with the mark. She didn’t know it all. But things like being aware if one of them was hurt, being able to track through the link mark, being able to heal each other with their blood. She knew there were things her source hadn’t told her, but she couldn’t tell me what. So my information pool is limited.”

“I can’t tell anything about either of you like that,” Hardison says, his voice hoarse.

“I don’t think the links are active. I think we would have to do something to activate them. I don’t know what.” Eliot drains his glass again. Definitely a full bottle conversation. “We might just have to touch them, bare skin to bare skin. We might have to share blood. I just don’t know.”

“I’ve never wanted to drink anyone’s blood,” Hardison says, voice still hoarse.

“You’ve never been exposed,” Parker says gently. “You don’t work in the field like that. And if you got your first mark when you were seven, the physical advantages probably never crossed your mind, and if anyone else noticed, they probably just assumed you were a growing boy, and growing boys get stronger and faster.”

Hardison drinks, throat working, his eyes down, not looking at either of them.

Finally, he says, “I don’t know if this is something I want to do anything about.”

“There’s no reason we should have to do anything about it at all if you don’t,” Eliot says simply, and means it. “But you should know, because if you ever are in a fight, the urge will probably be there. I don’t know if you can fight it off, since you know in advance, or if it will be like Parker and me, just something that happens when the blood… wakes up that place in the back of your brain.” He shrugs. “There is something you can do, though, something much better than I was able to manage back before the internet really existed.”

Hardison looks up, faintly interested in spite of the struggle on his face.

“You can hack. You can compile data. Nobody is better with a computer than you are, which is not something I could take advantage of. You can find out more, about whether there are others like us, and about vampires in general.” Eliot drains his glass again. “It could be important to know… well, everything there is to know. I get the feeling, like you feeling that the marks were a secret, that kind of feeling, I mean, that actual vampires, the living dead or whatever, would try to kill us if they found out about us.”

Eliot sees when Hardison starts thinking about it seriously, an odd kind of focus, like he’s going through the steps he’d have to take to research vampires, and some of the… not revulsion, though Eliot thinks Hardison had _wanted_ to be revolted. Something else, something all twisted up in his scent, uneasiness, uncertainty, a little fear, a little disgust, but not aimed at _them_. It’s all tightly wound around Hardison himself, as though those feelings are inwardly directed. He doesn’t smell of fear of Eliot and Parker.

Eliot thinks of pushing a little power into his eyes and inspecting Hardison more closely for a better sense of what he thinks of Eliot and Parker now, but then decides against it. Hardison might sense it for one. Eliot has never tried to use it on anyone else with his own abilities. But it boils down to deeply rooted good manners. Playing with Hardison’s mind would be like clandestinely watching him take a shower. Unfair.

Speaking of which, he turns to Parker. “Have you ever been able to mesmerize with your eyes?”

Her surprise shows on her face. “I’ve never tried.” She perks up instantly, excited. “Will it work on one of us? Can I try it on you?”

Hardison glances up, sharp interest in his eyes cutting almost entirely through the wine buzz he must be feeling and sending the uneasy mix of scents around him fading into something sharper, interest maybe, or fascination. “You can do that?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t have known except for the article I first found, and then all the fiction and occult stuff that I waded through trying to pin down facts. But yeah. I did it to the reporter to get her to talk to me, and I did it to the doctor that did my first physical after the first mark manifested while I was still in the Rangers to keep any notation of the mark out of my file.” Eliot shrugs. “The reporter actually wrote about how to do it with my blood, so that’s how I did it with her, but the doctor I just sort of… caught with my eyes and my mind. It was weaker that way, only a few seconds of… of easing the thought of the mark out of his head, but it worked. I haven’t needed it since then.”

“Tell me,” Parker says, and Hardison nods, and Spencer details both experiences to the best of his memory. Both of them look a little excited about the idea, and Eliot is relieved to see the expression on Hardison’s face.

“I don’t think we should do the blood one,” Parker says. “If Hardison doesn’t want to mess with whatever the marks might do if they don’t stay… dormant. We don’t know all of what they might do or what might activate them.” She sounds weirdly sanguine about it, and there’s that little electric curl to her scent that makes it sound like she might actually like to try to activate the marks, and Eliot can’t help feeling a little surprised. It’s a little contagious, though. With these two, everything is… not easy, but not threatening. He’s always been certain he wouldn’t want the intimacy of being link marked to anyone, but something turns over in his mind, something like the feel of the thing that had awakened the first time he’d drunk blood, and it is a low feeling, something he can control and ignore if that’s the way the ball bounces, but it’s there as a possibility in a way that it hadn’t been before.

“Yeah,” Eliot agrees easily. “Maybe Hardison can find out more about what we should and shouldn’t do concerning the marks, but I don’t feel. I mean, I don’t think trying _this_ on each other will be a problem.” Hardison looks faintly dubious, but Eliot gives him a firm nod. “A lot of what I’ve done has been automatic, Hardison. Like there is something built into my brain that helps me know what to do and what not to do. Instinct, I guess.”

“I’ll go first,” Parker volunteers, and drains her wine glass and sets it aside on the carpet. She turns her body to face Eliot’s a little more, and stares at him fearlessly, with the certainty that he won’t hurt her, and with absolutely no worry that he can detect about what he might see if he manages to catch her with his eyes and gets a glimpse of whatever is in her mind. He feels a heady little burst of admiration for her, and a stirring of what might be anticipation at the idea of getting a feel for _her_ mind in particular, because she’s Parker, and she isn’t like anyone else, she’s a thing unto herself, no point to ever trying to categorize her or compare her to anyone else.

Hardison leans forward, watching intently, a little tension still thrumming through him, but the kind that Eliot recognizes, the kind that means Hardison is taking everything in where he can sort and organize it in his genius brain and keep it and _know_ things, because that is what Hardison likes best. He likes to know things, even if he never uses him. He likes to use his skills to find out, and he likes to be there with the right answer if it’s ever needed.

Eliot turns his own body toward Parker’s, and admits, “I don’t know how this feels from the other side, so I apologize in advance if…”

She waves him silent. “Just do it, so I can try to do it to you!”

Eliot smirks a little at her excited impatience, and meets her gaze and reaches out at the same time for the shape of her mind. It’s actually easy, part of it maybe that she’s absolutely willing, and he senses the shape of her mind, fluid and flexible, and then a moment later her sexual desire hits him, enough of a surprise that he almost pulls back, but then is too curious to actually do it, and he feels how it encompases both Eliot and Hardison, each a little different to his sense of her mind, but both strong, and not feeling new at all. 

She blinks when he tugs his gaze away, and he’s not embarrassed, but is half-unwilling to know this about her, because he’s kept them so firmly in his head as colleagues and friends, and only a couple of times has he ever let him think about either of them with the degree of want he now knows Parker feels for them both, and it’s a little like that place in the back of his brain waking up, a sudden tightness in the pit of his belly, aware all at once that he has been wanting and denying it for a long time, and he’s never going to be able to look at either of them the same way again.

“I could feel it,” Parker says thoughtfully. “Like feathers across my mind, no pain. I didn’t feel like I was out of control of my mind.”

“I could do that, though,” Eliot says. “Or, I can to someone without the marks. I don’t know what resistances they give you. But I mean, the other two times, I took control. Not a lot, and not exactly by force, but by… suggestion. Like being able to implant an idea and make the person think it’s their own idea.”

Hardison, unexpectedly, asks, “Where are your fangs? I mean, do they just grow, or are they there all the time and… like, retractable, like a cats claws?”

Eliot has never actually paid attention, his mind always on the blood, and tries to capture the feeling of being about to bite, but Parker says easily, “They grow. Fast though, like faster than it takes to tell you about it.” She licks her lips, bares her teeth and runs the tip of her tongue along her even white upper teeth, and then when her tongue retreats she has a pair of thin, needle sharp canines, almost dainty looking. She patiently lets Hardison study them for a long moment -- Eliot does the same, wondering a little why it had never occurred to him to make his fangs grow when he wasn’t about to take a blood meal -- and then she grins, and the fangs retreat so quickly that even Eliot’s quick, quick eyes don’t really catch them shrinking. They are just there, and then not.

Hardison looks at Eliot, as though expecting a repeat performance, and Eliot tips his head in a hesitant denial. “I’ve never messed with them except to feed,” he says. “I don’t even know how to make them come out on command.”

Parker says, “It took me some practice, but it was actually in reverse. They were growing when I was startled or in danger, so I had to figure out how to be aware enough of them to keep them from doing that. Being able to expose them at will is just the flip side. I still have to think of the blood, think of what if feels like to drink, but it’s not a hard trick to learn. It was much harder to figure out how to keep them human shaped when I didn’t want to flash fangs at people.”

Eliot has never had a problem with that kind of fear reaction, too long as a soldier and a fighter, too good at controlling himself during a fight, but Parker is a more mercurial creature, and it isn’t hard to imagine her having to fight to control a fight or flight reflex like that.

“So,” Parker says. “I can do you now?” She looks at Hardison. “Or you. I just want to try it, I’m not picky.”

Hardison jerks a little, obviously not expecting it, but surprises Eliot when he says, “You can try me.” He pours the last of his bottle of wine into his glass, which half fills it, and then drinks the whole thing down. “I feel like I should be…” He hesitates. His voice is so low that it’s barely above a whisper. “Like I should be running for the door, in my sane brain, if you get what I mean, but it’s.” He looks up, including both Parker and Eliot in his gaze. “It’s _you_. And I am just not afraid of either of you, even though I feel like I should be.” 

Eliot feels a burst of warmth in his chest, something almost like gratitude, and Parker is nodding. “Yeah. I feel the same thing. Like. We couldn’t hurt each other even if we tried. And. We’ll know more, maybe, when Hardison gets to work on his hacking thing, but, if you think about it, the odds of us all meeting have got to be worse than lotto odds.” She tosses her head, and Eliot hears her echo in words what he’s thought to himself on multiple occasions. “I don’t believe in fate, but I don’t believe in this level of coincidence either.” She glances at both of them, seems to be satisfied with what she sees there, and then says, “Okay, Eliot, walk me through the peep show.”

But Eliot has an idea about that. “It’ll be easier to show you. I think I can… demonstrate, show you I mean, while I catch you. I think it might be both directions if you want it to be.”

She quirks a brow thoughtfully, then grins. “Okay, I’m game.”

Eliot reaches for her mind again, finds it again open and willing, and this time lets go of some kind of mental roadblock he hadn’t been aware of maintaining either of the other times he had done this. Parker’s eyes widen, and her pupils dilate, and it isn’t like talking, and Eliot isn’t sure all of what she gets from him, but it’s like teaching Hardison nerve pinches earlier had been. He pushes the steps toward her, feels her see them and study them, feels the moment she _gets_ it, and they both break eye contact. It hadn’t been what Eliot thinks of as communication, really, all done in images and feelings, no words, not like telepathy, but not _not_ like telepathy either. He doesn’t have a word for it.

Parker turns toward Hardison, who is waiting patiently, actually looking a little interested in this part, no fear riding him that Eliot can sense. Parker locks eyes with him, and Hardison’s eyes widen, and they stay that way for four or five minutes, long enough for Eliot to finish of the last of his wine and begin to itch with curiosity.

When they look away, Hardison has a slight grin on his face, and Parker looks pleased with herself in that smug way that she sometimes gets. “I showed him how to do it, too,” she says off-handedly. “So he has it, if he’s ever in trouble and needs it.” 

Eliot half-expects Hardison to want to try to catch Eliot up, but instead Hardison picks up his empty wine bottle and turns it over and over in his hands, studying the label. When he looks up at Eliot, his expression is heavy with new information, but calm enough to keep Eliot from worrying.

“I need to think,” Hardison says. “The idea of drinking blood should be intrinsically icky, but Parker… did something, showed me how it is, and I still don’t know if I want to do anything about this, but I’ll think about it. The hacking I will definitely do. If it’s out there, I’ll find it.”

“I know you will,” Eliot says with easy certainty. “And now that we’re all half-drunk and swimming in an ocean of new information, I think we better wrap this up before Sophie and Nate get back.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Parker says. “If you promise to order more of that kind of wine.”

“It’s a deal,” Eliot says, which is easy enough since he’d planned to do so all along (he’d had meal plans to go with those bottles), but he’s grateful for Parker’s offer to tidy up the wine bottles and piles of cushions anyway, because he’s suddenly exhausted and he needs to think, too, and he wants to slide between the cool sheets of his obscenely comfortable bed and let sleep tug him under. He thinks he’ll be awake for awhile, pondering the nights revelations, but as soon as he’s naked between the sheets, he’s out.


	10. Chapter 10

The weird thing is how not-weird it is in the morning. 

Eliot wakes up to the smell of frying sausage without a trace of a hangover, and rolls out of bed and into sweats and a t-shirt and socks and wanders out of his room to investigate.

Parker is sitting on the couch, hair tousled, wearing a rose colored silk robe and probably nothing else, cradling a cup of steaming coffee in both hands and looking like she isn’t hung over either. She looks up at him as he walks in, smiles a little absently, and says, “Hardison is making breakfast.” She adds, “The coffee is from Jamaica. Hardison says it’s the best coffee in the world. Did you order it?”

“I ordered everything we have in the kitchen, and it’s called Jamaican Blue Mountain, and is more expensive than the wine we drank last night. Let me know what you think about it.” He smirks. “I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but if I can get the really good stuff, sometimes I indulge myself.”

“And the rest of us,” Nate says, coming out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee of his own in his hand. He’s breathing in the steam with a bleary-eyed look of bliss on his face. “You better get some before Hardison starts drinking it directly from the pot.” He glances in the direction of Sophie’s closed bedroom door, and then rolls a shoulder in a half shrug. “She’ll probably miss out on it, but she’s really a tea drinker anyway, and I saw that you had her three favorites stocked.”

“I have everyone’s favorites stocked,” Eliot says simply and truthfully. “And the makings for everyone’s favorite meals I know how to whip up. There didn’t seem to be much point in staying in a place like this if we weren’t going to bother with all the creature comforts.”

“I feel confident in speaking for the entire team that we appreciate your attention to detail,” Nate says, and sips at his steaming coffee, closing his eyes and sighing a little.

Eliot shrugs and says, “Least I can do,” and passes by Nate to get to the kitchen and the coffee pot.

Hardison is a pretty good cook, not of Eliot’s calibre, but he can whip up perfectly done simple meals and a few other favorites that are more complicated, but he seldom bothers with it, with Eliot around, since Hardison merely cooks to get to the food part because he likes to eat, and Eliot actively enjoys cooking, which are two separate things.

There are eggs, pancakes in a warming pan, sausage -- both links and patties -- and Hardison is currently working on a skillet of sizzling fried potatoes. He glances up at Eliot, and while he doesn’t seem any more hungover than Parker or Eliot himself, his eyes are red-rimmed and Eliot is willing to bet he’d been up all night working on his newest research project. Still, he looks cheerful, not exhausted and not as if he’d found anything that needs to be immediately conveyed. He hooks a mug off a shelf and slides it across the counter to Eliot, who catches it handily and fills it with the fragrant coffee, brewed perfectly, dark and rich.

“Nobody here takes cream as far as I know, so I’m guessing that the half and half in the fridge is meant for you?” Hardison says, one side of his mouth tugged up in a soft grin. He opens the fridge and passes Eliot the half and half.

“I like my coffee creamy, when I drink it at all,” Eliot says, feeling weirdly like it’s an intimacy to confess it, compared to everything they’d talked about the night before. He tips some of the half and half into his cup, and Hardison hands him a spoon and relieves him of the carton of half and half at the same time. 

Eliot stirs his coffee, leans his hip against the counter, and drinks appreciatively. He wants to tell Hardison that the research isn’t something that has to be done in any kind of a hurry, but recognizes it as a waste of breath. Once Hardison is fixed on something, he doesn’t stop until he either has to eat or die, sleep or pass out, or think something through to figure out his next step.

Softly, Eliot asks, “Find out anything.”

Hardison stirs the potatoes and grimaces with a mixture of humor and disgust. “Yeah. There is a ton of stuff out there, a lot of it contradictory, and it’s going to take a while to sift through it well enough to come up with anything I’m comfortable calling fact. Honestly, Eliot, if you hadn’t given me someplace to start with that article and your own research, I’d be a lot more bogged down than I am.” He shakes his head. “Give me another couple of days and I think I’ll have some real information.”

Eliot nods and sips at his smooth, creamy coffee with a comfortable kind of contentment warming his chest.

Hardison drains the potatoes over the sink and then dumps them onto a platter lined with paper towels to soak up more of the grease. 

“Breakfast, first come first serve,” he calls out in a voice meant to carry, but even as he’s saying it, he’s dishing three pancakes, eggs, sausage, and potatoes onto a plate and passing it over to Eliot. 

Eliot grins and escapes the kitchen before the rest of the team stampede into the room. Eliot isn’t the only one that remembers the details. The pancakes are spread with the honey-blackberry compote he had brought from home because you can only get it from an obscure internet site that is probably some farm wife’s side business, which Eliot is totally addicted to, and he has a huge portion of fried potatoes compared to his serving of eggs, even though left to his own devices, Eliot would have reversed the serving sizes for health reasons. But Hardison knows his real preferences, and hadn’t given Eliot a chance to object. 

Eliot digs in with enthusiasm, slowly joined by everyone else around the dining table -- Eliot notes that Hardison has not shared his compote with any of the others -- and they eat and Nate talks about the ballet a little, proving that while it may not be something he indulges in often, he knows enough about it to make it obvious that he has had rather a lot of experience with it in the past. Sophie joins them last, already showered and dressed, makeup expertly applied, and she doesn’t seem bothered at having missed out on the fried potatoes, instead adding toast and what is presumably the other half of Parker’s cantaloupe from last night to her repast. Hardison had left the kettle hissing softly for her, and she chooses a second flush Darjeeling, a strong black tea that Eliot knows is her go to when she needs a caffeine hit.

“Eliot, darling,” she says, after she adds honey and sips several times. “I will pay you a retainer out of my own pocket if you’ll keep my tea stocked, both at home and in the office.”

Eliot laughs. “I’ll do that for free. Make me a list of what you like other than what I’ve already picked up, and I’ll set up the deliveries.”

Sophie grins. “Bill me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Eliot agrees, amused.

They talk about a couple of future jobs that Nate has his eyes on, but it’s all idle, nothing pressing, and when Eliot starts clearing dishes away, Hardison retreats to his room and comes back with his laptop, grinning a little, and says, “Got a little something put together to celebrate our resident muscle,” he says, and Eliot knows without having to ask that Hardison had watched the video again on his laptop, and is confident that none of the footage on the small screen shows anything that Eliot wouldn’t want seen.

They gather around one side of the table, huddled behind where Hardison is sitting in front of his computer, and this time Eliot is able to appreciate and enjoy Hardison’s creative genius, grinning a little at the commentary from the rest of the team, which runs along the lines of, “ooh, that had to hurt,” and “I can’t believe you did that with an urn,” and, little exclamations that are like audible winces. They watch it twice, mostly laughing through the second viewing, and they make much of Eliot’s adventures and Hardison’s soundtrack and the timing involved in getting the footage to sync up to the music.

Things feel normal.

Sophie tries to talk Parker into visiting the hotel spa with her, which Parker adamantly refuses on the grounds that she doesn’t like strangers touching her, which they all know about her, and which Sophie can’t formulate an objection to, though she would clearly like to. In the end, Sophie disappears down to the spa and Nate vanishes without announcing where he’s going, which means he’s probably going to the hotel bar, and Eliot, Hardison, and Parker are left alone again.

Eliot eats up a few minutes of time ordering replacement bottles of wine from room service, aware of Hardison and Parker talking in quiet voices but not particularly curious about the conversation.

“We could set up a job,” Parker is saying when Eliot hangs up the phone. “Once you find out enough to give us a place to start.”

Alarm prickles down Eliot’s spine. “Surveillance if we can set it up, but nothing that exposes any of the three of us to any of the real vampires. I… I feel pretty sure that if they recognize what we are that they’ll want to kill us for it. I don’t _know_ , but I _feel_ it.”

Hardison gives Eliot a grave look, but Parker just nods. “You and me,” she says to Eliot. “But Hardison has never drank a drop of human blood.”

“No,” Eliot says a little sharply. “The risk isn’t worth it. And we’re not trying to do anything to the vampires except stay out of their way, so there’s really no point to digging into their daily… or nightly, or whatever, lives. This is a fact finding excursion only. We want to know what they can do because it will tell us more about what we can do, and other than that, we want to just keep off their radar.”

Parker frowns a little, but grudgingly nods.


	11. Chapter 11

The rest of the vacation is cut short by an urgent contact requesting their specialized brand of problem solving, and Eliot salvages the wine, coffee, and tea, and regretfully leaves the rest for the staff to deal with.

Back at the office, Hardison’s free time is nonexistent as he puts together details on the con, and the rest of them don’t have a lot of it either as they hash out the best way to take down a racketeering ring run by the biggest crime family in the city without getting caught anywhere near any of the fall out.

The link marks never leave Eliot’s thoughts entirely, but he has a lot less attention to devote to mulling over any of it, as he spends most of each morning sleeping late, and most of each night intervening with the local businesses being fleeced for protection money on an individual basis. Because his face is fairly well-known here on their home turf, Eliot takes special care to disable his opponents severely enough that they’ll have to take a couple of weeks off to heal, and to use his abilities to smudge his face in their memories, so none of the muscle can exactly remember what the guy who took them down even looks like. He smudges the memories of witnesses, too, because he knows they’ll be questioned, and Hardison takes care of anyplace that has cameras. Eliot spends so much of his time covering as much territory as he can that he’s only vaguely aware that Hardison is working up a money laundering scheme, with Sophie grifting it, and that Parker had managed to break into the actual house and plant bugs and listening devices, and that she proudly announces that she hadn’t stolen a single thing while doing it, even though there had been plenty to take, since the point was for them never to know that she had been there at all, and missing items might have caused a search of the premises.

He’s amused at how proud of herself she sounds, and at the fondness it puddles in his midsection, even as he’s not at all happy about the idea of her breaking into a mob family home to plant bugs and cameras without some kind of backup, even though he knows that’s stupid. Hardison would have been monitoring her, and she’s their break-in specialist, she’s good at it, the job is normally hers and the link marks don’t change that.

Over the course of several days, the mob starts to run out of quality people, and Eliot has a much easier time dealing with their replacements. Hardison and Sophie work together to plant some damning financial evidence in the mob’s accounts, Sophie running the legwork on hard copy, and Parker, seeming less bored than she normally does, monitors the surveillance devices and passes on information to Hardison. Nate coordinates, but there’s no big part in this for him, which is how it works about half the time, except to be the big picture planner, and to eventually call in the police, anonymously delivering tapes and documents to the Organized Crime Division, and it isn’t as exciting as some of their jobs, or as off the wall, but it’s important enough for them to take the time to do it.

Hardison manages to embezzle most of the mob’s offshore holdings, and there is a nice paycheck in it for all of them, though the paycheck has never been what Eliot has been in it for.

Eliot makes them dinner when the con wraps up and the bad guys are headed to jail, doing it to unwind from the state of constant physical readiness he had been pressed into and under, and watching them eat and enjoy his food is enough to take his mind off the violence and back to the team itself, the flawless way they work together, the way they complement each other, and is silently impressed with them all over again.

A few days pass in relative peace and quiet. Hardison and Parker join Eliot for dirty pool almost every day, and something settles in Eliot, that they’re willing to learn to protect themselves because it’s important to _him_ , although in the end, it turns out to be both fun and funny, one of the best parts of Eliot’s day. Having them in his apartment stops being weird after the first two days, and both seem to think that this means they have standing invites, so show up at odd times for odd reasons, things that they could do in their own places just as easily. Hardison with his laptop, digging deep now, and Parker brings over a set of what she calls her backup gear, black form fitting clothes, rappelling gear and harnesses, and rearranges Eliot’s closet until she has it stored how she wants it.

They don’t leave after workouts, but use Eliot’s shower and Hardison works on his laptop while Parker works on another, Hardison slowly building up her skills by assigning her tasks, which she takes to with far less grumbling than Eliot would have guessed. Eliot himself gets lessons in basic electronic thievery, so that maybe the next time they have to be on site to steal something from an entirely closed system, Eliot can manage it without having to get Hardison in and protect him while he does his thing. He’s not great at it, but he’s getting the hang of the tools and Hardison says what he really needs is on the job practice, which they will inevitably sooner or later get.


	12. Chapter 12

Hardison shakes Eliot awake one night, a dark shadow in Eliot’s dark bedroom, and it’s a testament to his abilities -- even without Hardison having ever taken a blood meal -- that he’d managed to get inside at all without waking Eliot. It’s also probably an indicator that Eliot needs to feed soon; he isn’t clear on the last time he had done it, but it’s been several weeks. Parker is already with him, a paler blur in the darkness of Eliot’s bedroom. “I found it,” Hardison says, and Eliot doesn’t have to ask what ‘it’ is. Anything else, anything lesser, and Hardison would have waited until morning. Eliot rolls out of bed naked, sees them seeing him, and feels heat in his face that he hopes the darkness hides. He drags a lightweight pair of workout pants on without bothering with underwear, and doesn’t bother with a shirt or socks to hide the marks.

He’s still careful with Nate and Sophie, but with Hardison and Parker in his space all the time, he’d gotten lax about hiding them. He’s in his own apartment, after all, and he hardly ever wears more than pants when he’s at home.

Hardison has Eliot’s big TV hooked up to his laptop, and he lays it all out like it’s intel for a con.

“The problem is that there is so much fiction out there, man, I mean whole groups of people that pretend to be vampires and get false fangs put in, but the key to finding the real vampires boils down to the marks.” He presses a button on a tiny remote, and a picture of a man comes up on the screen. He’s pale and still, and elegantly dressed in suit and tie; the shot looks like it had been pulled from a security camera in an elevator. 

The mark is at the base of his throat, a stylized backward ‘S’ shape, blue and silver, and can only be seen because the man’s tie is pulled down and the top two buttons of his suit are undone. He looks like a man coming home from a long day at work. But he doesn’t breathe, Eliot notes, and stands so eerily still that uneasiness skitters up Eliot’s spine.

“What building in this?”

“Broadmoor condos,” Hardison says. “But watch.” 

The elevator stops and the doors open and another pale figure gets inside, a woman wearing a blood red evening gown. They don’t speak to each other, and on the inside of her left wrist is a twisting coil of green and brown, shaped vaguely like a vine. The elevator doors close again, and Hardison taps a button on the remote, skipping ahead when the elevator is empty, and playing it through when it’s occupied. There are dozens of them.

All the video is from the same elevator footage, and they all have visible marks in a vast variety of shapes and sizes and colors and locations.

“They occasionally come up with humans, but I’ve never seen a human go back down,” Hardison says heavily. “The Broadmoor is owned through three separate shell corporations, all of them ultimately funneling into offshore accounts. There are others that live off site, and there are a few that aren’t affiliated with this group, but from what I can tell, the Broadmoor is vamp central in our city. The rest of it isn’t as fact based. I hacked their systems, but there isn’t any kind of instruction manual out there, so I ended up spending a lot of time just reading their emails.” He rubs his face. “They’re divided up into clan families, and there are a lot of secret little schemes going on between them, but it all seemed pretty much internal. Except for owning land and businesses and making money hand over fist through proxy companies, I haven’t come across any kind of plans that seem dangerous to regular people. Not big plans, I mean. Just. The ones that go up but don’t come back down.” He swallows hard. “But we don’t want active involvement with them, just want to stay below their radar, so I guess it’s good they don’t seem to be plotting against humanity as a whole. They’re too busy plotting against each other. But the real gem is Selena Ramirez, who is only five years old as a vampire, and keeps a computerized journal. I had to hunt for it, and since their system is almost entirely intranet, I feel like it was sheer luck I found it at all. But she’s our goldmine.”

Hardison flips the remote toward the T.V. and shows a petite hispanic woman with a bright smile and sparkling eyes. “This was her before she was turned,” Hardison says. “I found it in her files. I didn’t find any pictures of her after. But little Selena has faithfully kept a journal in the five years since she was turned, and she doesn’t hold anything back.”

Hardison sets the remote down on the table, and grabs a stack of bound manuscripts from one edge of the coffee table and passes them out. “I’ll summarize, don’t worry,” he says, as Parker weighs the hard copy in her hands with a frown. “But I still think you should read it. It’s got a lot of good information in it about vampire relationships and politics and the way that the different clan families interact, which is maybe not important now, but if they ever get wind of us, could become vital intelligence.”

Eliot agrees completely, and sees Parker cock her head a little, thoughtful. “And you think this might happen?” she asks.

“They call us Daywalkers, and they think we exist to hunt them down,” Hardison says heavily. “That’s one of the big rules. If a vampire tracks down a Daywalker, they kill them on sight. And… if the information in Selena’s journal is true, a Daywalker with an active link mark can sense vampires, so maybe that _is_ why we exist. A Daywalker can activate his mark by drinking the blood of a vampire, and then can use that mark to track vampires and kill them. Other than that, she doesn’t know anything about link marks on Daywalkers, but if it works for us the way the link marks work for them, then the three of us -- they’ve never come across more than solo Daywalkers from what I can tell -- would have to take blood directly from the marks to activate them. I’m extrapolating, because for the vampires, the mark appears wherever the creating vampire bites the newbie, and on the maker, appears wherever the newbie first takes blood from the maker. Between vampires, the mark creates a bond, but what you get from the bond varies between vampires. All of them seem to get the ability to sense the physical well being of each other, the ability to track each other, the ability to heal each other, but some bonds allow a limited form of telepathy, apparently pretty short in terms of distance, the ability to draw power, strength and speed through the bond if one of them needs it, and… and it’s supposed to make the sex great.” Hardison scratches his cheek, looking faintly uncomfortable. “There may be other things she doesn’t know about, but those are the ones she has documented. Abilities they get just from being vampires are strength, speed, enhanced senses, and eternal life, if that’s what you want to call it. Weaknesses include sunlight, holy articles from any faith, silver, and the prosaic stake through the heart, though some of the really old ones can heal from even that if they remove the stake and drink enough blood, according to Selena’s journal. So the only sure way is to cut off their heads. And.” Hardison pauses, looking a little uneasy. “Neither of you mentioned how often you… feed, but I got the feeling that it wasn’t that often?”

“Every few weeks if I want to stay in top fighting form,” Eliot says. “It’s like… I don’t really need it to live. And I don’t need to take much. And my baseline for strength and reflexes is above human normal even if I haven’t fed for months. But a feeding increases my abilities dramatically, upping strength and speed and reflexes and heightening my senses enormously.”

Parker nods. “Yeah, pretty much the same here,” she says. “The vampires need more?” she half asks.

“From what I can tell, most of them, at least, need to feed nightly. There is some indication from Selena’s journals that older vampires might not have to feed quite as often, but it’s speculation on her part. And their clan families include human members that drink the vampires blood, which gives the humans some extra strength and speed, and which also slows the aging process. In return, the vampires have a ready meal on hand any time they need it, and bodyguards during the daytime when they can’t protect themselves.” Hardison hesitates. “They don’t have to kill when they feed, but they do it sometimes because it’s like getting high for them. More blood equals more power. They don’t do it every night, but they do it. The clan families, not so much, but there are other vampires out there, Selena calls them ‘rogues’ that do it all the time. A vampire from a clan family will take out a rogue vampire if they come across one, by the way, but I don’t get the feeling that they go out looking for them.” Hardison looks troubled. “And their mind control powers seem a lot stronger than ours, though we don’t really have enough experience with them to be sure about that, and without having the link marks active…” He trails off and scrubs a hand over the top of his head.

Parker says, “I think we should activate them.” Eliot and Hardison both jerk their gazes to her face, Eliot surprised, and Hardison looking uncertain. 

Not so surprised that he doesn’t want to do it, though, he admits quietly, and only to himself.

And Hardison turns away for a moment, rubbing his hand across his face again, and says, “I don’t want to activate them until I’m sure I can… until I actually find out whether or not I can feed.” When he turns back, he looks taut and a little miserable. “I can’t get my head around the part where I drink human blood. The link marks… I’ve got a pros and cons list and my head about those, and most of the things we know about them go under the pros column, but I can’t. The idea of drinking someone else’s blood might be a deal breaker for me, I’m not going to lie.”

Eliot isn’t that surprised. Parker looks like she isn’t either.

“So,” she says softly. “Blood drinking aside, the link marks are okay with all of us. I mean, everybody is on board with activating them if it can be done.”

Eliot gives the question the attention it deserves, and then merely nods.

Hardison says, “I’m up for it. It’s just the…” He trails off and waves a hand.

“Then we wait,” Eliot says. Parker throws him a sharp look, and Eliot knows exactly what she’s thinking. That it wouldn’t be that hard to set up a situation in which Hardison is exposed to the right set of circumstances to activate whatever instinct it is that had led both Eliot and Parker to feed for the first time. But he thinks Hardison would not be happy with that kind of a setup. It’s one thing to drink from a bad guy that’s trying to hurt or kill you. It’s entirely different to go out and pick a fight and force that first feeding.

Hardison looks relieved. “But I do have a plan,” he says, looking at Parker more than at Eliot, as though he understands that Eliot gets it in a way that Parker doesn’t. “The next time we get a job, I’ll go in with Eliot. We’ll figure out a way to make it make sense for Nate and Sophie, and I’ll… I’ll make sure I’m in the middle of the fighting. If it’s going to happen, I think that’s the most likely time.”.

Parker gives Hardison a long look, and Eliot actually sees the moment that she gets what Hardison’s problem is. Her expression softens, and she reaches out and takes his hand. “Okay,” she says. “It has to be the bad guys.”

Hardison sighs out a little sound of relief. “Yeah. I mean… I’m still not sure, even with it being the bad guys. I can’t… I have a good imagination, but I can’t imagine wanting to drink anybody’s blood. But if it’s instinct, if it’s something that comes online by instinct, I want to be sure that whoever I bite deserves to get bitten.”

Eliot nods. “We’ll work out something to get Hardison in with me as soon as we get a job that will work for it,” he says.

Hardison lets out a jaw cracking yawn. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” he says, and squeezes Parker’s hand. 

Since it’s two in the morning, none of them have any objections to that. “Just take the guest rooms,” Eliot says, since they broke into his apartment just to come and tell him this. “We’ll talk about it more in the morning.”


	13. Chapter 13

The next job is a bust. They need Hardison too much on the tech to get him into the building with Eliot, and the job after that is all grifter work. Eliot doesn’t throw a single punch.

Parker’s impatience is almost a tangible thing, and Eliot is actually thinking about asking whether or not he and Parker can stage a fight between the two of them without Hardison being royally pissed at them, when the opportunity presents itself in the most unlikely fashion possible.

The three of them have been spending almost all their free time together -- if Nate and Sophie notice this, they haven’t mentioned it, which isn’t that much of a surprise since Nate and Sophie have been spending pretty much all of their own free time with one another -- and Hardison has been keeping an electronic eye on the vampires, but hasn’t hacked into their system again. They mostly haven’t been thinking about the vampires at all.

Until they are walking home from a technology expo that had Hardison flailing like a muppet at the idea of attending, and Parker and Eliot both are getting good enough with computers and security systems that they have a kind of keep-Hardison-happy-and-actually-a little-bit-interested combo going on, and Eliot hears a low, bitten off groan as they pass the mouth of an alley not even two blocks from his apartment. Parker’s head snaps up, so she hears it, too. Hardison keeps walking a few steps, realizes that they’ve stopped, and turns to look a question at them.

“Mugging?” Parker whispers.

“Could be just a homeless guy,” Eliot says, but it hadn’t sounded like a homeless guy, and his blood is up. Eliot keeps the ten city blocks around his apartment pretty much free of crime -- Hardison calls him Batman for it -- just by patrolling it on a regular basis. Since Parker had started hanging out at Eliot’s so much, she’s done a little patrolling on her own.

The three of them circle back, cat-footed, even Hardison almost silent, and duck into the alley.

It’s not a mugging.

It’s a vampire.

He’s holding a blonde woman by the hair, her head tipped back to expose the vulnerable line of her throat, but he’s looking at a man, one hand held out as though to stop him, though the vampire isn’t physically touching the man at all. The man is just standing, eyes glazed in the dim light. The woman whimpers, and the vampire, a tall, slim man in a two-thousand dollar suit, turns his attention back to her. When his gaze meets hers, she goes quiet and limp.

The vampire bends tips his head and moves his lips toward her throat, and Hardison whispers, “Eliot,” almost a plea, and Eliot doesn’t know how strong they are, whether or not their mind control will work on him, doesn’t know enough to know if he can win this fight, or even if they should interfere considering the fact that they’re trying to stay under the radar of the cities vampire population, and also hasn’t fed himself in weeks, but the plea in Hardison’s voice seems to be all that really matters. 

He signals Parker to get herself around behind the vampire while Eliot distracts him, and then sprints into the alley at full speed, aware that he doesn’t have a wooden stake, just a couple of knives in his boots which were not remotely designed to behead people with.

The vampire doesn’t look up until Eliot is almost on top of him, his pale skin smooth and almost alien looking, his eyes huge, dark pools, his lips red with the woman’s blood, and surprise writ large on his face as though in neon. He drops the girl and spins, faster than humanly possible, and Eliot tucks in one shoulder and rams into him, knocking him off his feet.

Parker, already in position, drops to her knees and loops a garotte around the vampire’s neck, her expression twisted with effort as she pulls it tight. Eliot falls on top of the thing, and really, he’d been expecting more of a fight, but the vampire seems so surprised that for several seconds he doesn’t do anything but lay there, stunned, while Eliot slams a fist into his face once, twice, three times, and the garotte can’t really be hurting the vampire since he doesn’t need to breathe, but Parker is pulling it so tight that there is a thin line of blood welling up from around the wire.

Eliot can hear Hardison trying to get the man and woman to get the hell out of here, and their footsteps as they stumble away, and then the vampire bucks, arching his back to try to dislodge Eliot, and he’s strong as hell, it almost works, but Eliot fists his hands into the things expensive suit coat and hangs on, and he sees the blow coming from the corner of his eye, but can only duck his head a little and brace for it. It slams into his temple, sending bright explosions of light through his head, and the thing is strong, definitely stronger than Eliot, but Parker is still holding him down by the wire around his throat, her knees under her, her back bent back as she pulls, and Eliot wonders a little blearily if she’s strong enough to actually behead the vampire with the wire, which is biting deeply into flesh, blood welling up around the vampire’s throat and puddling beneath him on the ground. Eliot slams his fist into the vampire’s jaw, feeling the satisfying crunch of bone under his knuckles, and the vampire’s eyes are suddenly wide black pools, beckoning. Eliot jerks his gaze away quickly, and then Hardison is there.

Hardison is there with a piece of a wooden crate, broken off into a ragged sharp point, and Eliot leans back to give him a clear shot. The vampires hands come up and grab at Eliot, trying to pull him back down to use as a shield, but Eliot catches them and jerks them down, and Hardison jams the piece of wooden crate into the vampire’s chest, missing the angle for the heart, but apparently the strike is good enough to disable, because he goes limp in Eliot’s grasp, his eyes rolling up to reveal the whites.

“You didn’t get the heart,” Eliot growls.

“I’m new at this,” Hardison pants, and then Hardison is shoving Eliot gently off the vampire -- Eliot goes, though he keeps his hands around the vampires wrists, because he thinks Hardison is going to pull out the makeshift stake and take another shot at it -- and before Eliot can think to do anything about it, Hardison is bending over the vampire, mouth at his bloody throat. The creature jerks full body when Hardison bites him, Eliot can just barely see the glint of Hardison’s fangs as they pierce the skin below Parker’s garotte, but the vampire doesn’t otherwise struggle or move, just as inanimate as the corpse he is, eyes still rolled up to reveal the whites. Hardison grabs the lapels of the vampire’s coat and pulls him up for a better angle, and Eliot can see his throat working as he swallows.

He looks up at Parker, who is looking back, both of them with the same expression of nervous uncertainty. Neither of them have bitten a vampire before. There is no way to know what difference it might make.

Hardison draws back after only a few seconds, is very still for several more seconds, and then he jerks the makeshift stake out of the vampire’s chest and drives it in again, this time his aim right on the mark.

Eliot has no idea what to expect, but nothing at all happens, the vampire doesn’t poof into ash like in Buffy or start to decay immediately like in some of the stories Eliot had read.

Hardison wipes his hand over the back of his mouth, smearing blood off his lips, and looks up at the sky, his expression open and stunned with something like awe. Eliot doesn’t do anything, he remembers his own first blood meal. Parker unwinds her garotte from the vampire’s throat and cleans it off with his silk tie, before coiling it and tucking it away in her shirt. She looks at Eliot, a question on her face, and Eliot gives her a tiny shrug. He doesn’t know what the differences might be in having vampire blood as a first feeding.

Hardison’s hands slowly unclench from around the vampire’s lapels and he drops him, and looks down at the body.

“We have to get rid of this,” he says, sounding calm and steady.

“There’s a dumpster at the back of the alley,” Parker says, pragmatic as ever. Hardison rises gracefully to his feet while Parker rifles through his pockets and takes his wallet and his watch, more to make it look like a mugging gone wrong than because she wants either of them, though having the vampires identity might be useful in some way in the future.

“Eliot, get the legs,” he says, and between the two of them, they carry the body to a wretched smelling dumpster that is about half full. Parker lifts the lid, and they heave the corpse into the dumpster.

“Hardison,” Eliot begins, not sure what it is he intends to ask.

“It’s okay,” Hardison says. “I”m okay. I can hear your heartbeat and smell your blood, and I feel…” He pauses and tips his head up into the sky. “Like I can smell everything on the wind. I feel… strong.”

Parker produces a tiny packet of wet wipes and cleans the blood off of Hardison’s face and hands, and then off of her own hands. Hardison lets her, leaning in a little to breathe in the scent of her.

“We don’t know what differences it will make that your first blood meal was from a vampire,” Eliot says.

“According to what the vampires know about Daywalkers, feeding from a vampire will activate a Daywalker’s mark,” Hardison says, sounding a little more like himself. “It’s also supposed to let the Daywalker sense vampires, but I don’t sense anything right now. And this guy wasn’t one of the Broadmoor vampires. I have files on everyone I’ve seen go in or out of the that place. It’s possible he won’t be missed.”

Hardison sounds more hopeful than certain about it, but then adds, “When I bit him, I could sort of, see his mind. Not read it, not in words, but. He’s not from Portland. He’s from someplace down south, he’s an independant, no clan family. The only one that might miss him is the one that made him, and.” He shakes his head a little. “I feel like they weren’t close. Like their bond wasn’t strong.” He shakes he head a little again. “I can’t tell you how I know any of that. Just that I do.”

He looks up at Eliot. “I want to walk by the Broadmoor,” he says.

“Not tonight,” Eliot hedges, not wanting Hardison to do it at all, but keeping that to himself for the moment. “Not until we activate the marks. We’ll be stronger once we activate the marks.”

Hardison frowns, but then nods. “Yeah. We should.” He looks at Parker and then at Eliot, eyes wide for several seconds. “We can do that now.” He sounds both nervous and excited. “I can feel that we can do that now. I feel the pull of the two of you.”

“When?” Parker asks, her voice edged with that same nervy anticipation as Hardison’s. 

Eliot feels it, too, suddenly, like Hardison’s first blood meal had awakened something in him, can feel the pull they’re talking about, something strong and new that hadn’t been there before Hardison had plunged his fangs into the vampire’s neck, and suddenly he is half-hard in his jeans and his pulse starts to pound in his throat. It’s all so sudden and immediate that Eliot feels a little light headed for a few seconds, and then Parker is grabbing his hand, her other hand twined with Hardison’s, and she is running, they are all running, keeping to the shadows, running at faster than human speeds, and they are only a couple of blocks from Eliot’s apartment, so it’s no surprise that they end up there.


	14. Chapter 14

They all three freeze up when the door slams closed behind them, hands still clasped, looking at each other, and Eliot can feel his own expression, can tell that he is just as wide eyed and abruptly uncertain as they both look.

There are several long seconds of silence, and then Parker blurts, “Is this going to include sex?”

Eliot’s cock twitches in his jeans and he sees Hardison swallow, but he just says, “Do you want it to include sex?” meeting her eyes carefully, keeping his expression open and not trying to hide what he wants, but willing to back off if she doesn’t.

“Yes,” she says at once. “I’ve always wanted, that is, you are both, and I just didn’t do anything because I didn’t want anyone to be left out.” It comes out all in a rush, as though it’s easy for her to say. She turns to look at Hardison. “Do you want just the marks, or…”

Hardison swallows hard, and says, “I’m in it for the whole deal, but I…” His gaze flashes to Eliot for a second, then away, and then back again, holding his gaze. “This is probably a good time to confess that I don’t have any experience with men. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to. I’ve known I could go either way since I was a teenager. I just haven’t ever… I just didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to trust them.”

Eliot feels a little thrill at this that he should probably feel guilty for, but doesn’t. “I can walk you through it,” he says, and reaches out and takes Hardison’s hand, so all three of them are linked, hands locked around in a loose circle.

Hardison’s eyes go a little wide, and he breathes, “You, uh,” and then he licks his lips and lets out a brief, short sound that is half laugh, half relief.

“Sex first or marks first,” Parker asks, and jerks her blouse off over her head, revealing perfect, perky breasts, no bra, nipples pale pink and tight, and Eliot can see the goosebumps across her skin.

Eliot lets himself look at her for a long moment, but then glances at Hardison. “Didn’t you say the marks were supposed to make the sex great?”

“I think the sex is probably going to be great anyway,” Hardison says a little hoarsely, his gaze hung up on Parker’s breasts. “But yeah, according to Selena’s journal, the marks make a difference. A big enough difference that she spent a lot of time dwelling on it.” He swallows visibly and drags his gaze away from Parker’s breasts to Eliot’s face. “There may have to be some experimentation with the marks though, so maybe better to try to get them online first?”

Eliot doesn’t answer, just reaches out a hand to drag his fingertips along the spiral mark on Parker’s back. She shivers, letting out a little gasp, and then says, “If it’s all going to be like this, we should all be naked and horizontal, just from a logistics perspective.” Her voice is trembling a little, excitement that seem to be hovering on the verge of hilarity, and Eliot feels his lips quirk in response even as Hardison grins.

“Eliot, I hope you’ve got supplies, man, because I did _not_ leave the house tonight expecting anything even remotely like this,” Hardison says.

“I do, plenty of lube, plenty of condoms,” Eliot assures him.

“No, I hate condoms,” Parker whines, and her lips curve into an adorable pout. “I’m on birth control shots, I don’t even get periods anymore, and I know we’re all clean, I can…” She stops and inhales deeply, turning toward Eliot for a moment, then toward Hardison. “I can smell that we’re all clean.”

Eliot feels his brows arch and inhales deeply, curious, and yeah, he can smell it, three healthy bodies, laced with the smell of sexual desire.

“Okay,” he says, and glances at Hardison. “Okay?”

“I’ve never barebacked,” Hardison says, and his eyes have gravitated toward Parker’s breasts again. “And I can smell everything so strongly I can’t really parse what it all means yet, but I’m willing to take y’alls word for it.” He reaches out and runs his fingertips lightly over the purple, peach, and black swirl of color that curves along the underside of Parker’s breast.

Parker’s eyelids flutter and she inhales deeply, but she’s Parker, and once she gets something she wants in her head, she doesn’t let go. “Bed,” she says. She steps back, turns on her heel, and heads in the direction of Eliot’s bedroom. Eliot tries to remember if he has piles of laundry on the floor and then decides he doesn’t care, and follows her, sensing rather than seeing Hardison fall in behind him.

Parker flips on the bedside lamp, casting the room in a warm, golden glow, and looks around curiously. She smiles when she sees Eliot’s bed. “That’s a big bed for one person,” she says.

“Yeah, well,” Eliot says, and then just shrugs. “I just got the biggest one they had when I finally settled down someplace. Too many years sleeping in Army bunks and holing up in safe houses and shitty little enforcer barracks.”

He goes to the nightstand and pulls out a bottle of lube and sets it there where he won’t have to fumble for it when he needs it, and when he turns back around, Parker has stripped off her jeans along with her underwear, and is standing naked and golden and gorgeous in the pool of lamplight. Eliot’s hands itch to touch her, but instead he drags his t-shirt off over his head and bends to take off his boots. He can hear Hardison’s clothes rustling, but he can’t bring himself to look up and see for fear that seeing them both naked will be too much for him to take, and he’ll vapor-lock or something. He kicks his boots into a corner and skins down his jeans and underwear and socks all in a tangle, kicking them into the same corner.

When he stands up, Hardison has his hands on the hips of his jeans, the fly open, but he’s just staring at Eliot, eyes a little dazed, mouth open. Parker circles around Eliot and gently tucks her fingers into the waist of Hardison’s jeans and tugs them down, taking Hardison’s boxer briefs with them, doing it slow and careful, like she’s afraid she might either spook him or hurt him. Hardison’s dazed gaze drifts down to look at her, naked on her knees at his feet, and he makes a soft, hoarse sound of raw lust, but he manages to step out of his jeans when she tugs them down to his ankles, and then lets her take off his socks one at a time, balance easy and thoughtless in a way that Eliot is willing to bet Hardison has never been in his life previous to his first blood meal.

Parker stands up and backs a couple of feet away. Hardison looks at the wall and then the bed, and then clears his throat roughly. “The marks,” he says, his voice only a little unsteady. “There are two possibilities. It may be just as simple as sharing blood, but with the actual vampires, the marks appear where the blood is actually taken from, so it’s possible we might have to take blood from the marks themselves.”

“We might as well take blood from the marks,” Eliot says. “It covers both bases at once.”

Parker nods. “Can either of you draw out your fangs at will?” she asks.

Hardison pauses for a long moment, clearly trying, and then sort of shakes his head. Eliot shrugs. “I have been meaning to practice, but I hadn’t gotten around to it.”

“Then I’ll go first?” she asks, looking back and forth between them for permission. She shaking a little, Eliot sees. Trembling.

“Are you alright?” he asks, suddenly concerned, and she shakes her head, then nods, and then waves a hand. 

“You both smell so good,” she murmurs, and Eliot sees that her fangs have already descended, and the look she’s giving them both is sharp with want, and he remembers how it had felt to touch her mind and discover that want there, and how it hadn’t felt new at all, but rather like something she had been…. He’s not sure, maybe smothering under the weight of it, of keeping it secret, of holding it back.

Hardison and Spencer both take a step toward her, and her eyes dart from one of them to the other quickly, and then she steps toward Eliot, throwing Hardison a soft look. “He’s been doing this longer than you,” she says. “And he’s used his mental powers more than both of us combined. I’m more sure he can stop me if I… if I can’t.”

Hardison nods, doesn’t even look disappointed, but he moves in closer, as though he wants to get a good look at what’s going on.

Parker stalks around Eliot and shoves him backward onto the bed. He could have stopped her, though she’s strong, maybe even as strong as he is, but she’s not the kind of fighter that he’s been trained to be. But he doesn’t resist at all, just falls backward. “Scoot up,” she says, and he gets his feet under him and moves to the middle of the bed, and she says, “And take your hair down.”

Eliot feels a little twinge of pleasure at that, an arc of desire, but he merely tugs the hairband out of his hair and tosses it over the side of the bed. She locks her hand around his left arm and pulls it up, revealing the mark along his topmost rib. She touches it, and he feels it like a mild jolt of electricity, and a little hiss of breath escapes him.

“We’re sure about this,” she says, gaze moving from the mark to Eliot’s eyes, and then turning to meet Hardison’s. “This is going to change everything.” Her tone is laced with desire, but is also uncharacteristically solemn, as though she sincerely wants to give them the chance to back out now, if that’s what they want.

“I’m sure,” Eliot says, and he is, now that he’s no longer thinking of them as colleagues or teammates or friends, now that he can see them both, golden and dark and naked and in his bedroom, and he’s done ignoring what the marks might mean, and the fact is that he might want the two of them even if the marks didn’t exist.

“I’m sure,” Hardison says, voice low and deep, a little gravelly sounding with lust in a way that makes Eliot’s balls tighten just to hear it.

“Okay then,” Parker says, and dips her head. 

Her fangs hurt for one brief, sharp second, and then she slides her lips against his skin and sucks, and Eliot lets out a groan that he can’t even believe came from his own throat. He’s never been a noisy lover, is just not really a noisy person in general, he is contained, but her fangs buried in the link mark sends a hot wash of desperate heat throughout every part of his body. He can feel it from his scalp prickling all the way along the soles of his feet, she is barely even touching him, just one hand on his wrist and the other in his hair, as though she had just wanted to touch his hair, and his hips buck up off the bed as she drinks his blood from the mark, and he wonders very vaguely if he would even try to stop her, if he might not let her drain him dry, because it’s that sensual, that erotic, that _powerful_ , but he doesn’t have to find out because she pulls back on her own after only maybe half a dozen swallows of his blood, and licks at the knicks in his flesh, leaving smooth, healed skin there. But he can feel something building, can feel a part of what they’re making, and he tips his head back against the pillow and gasps out a long, shuddering breath, thinking a little blearily that if the sex is better than _that_ , it might actually kill him.

“Alec,” Parker says, her lips red with Eliot’s blood, and she just gestures. Hardison doesn’t even hesitate, though his gaze is fixed on Eliot, rather than Parker, and his eyes are wide and dark. He climbs up on the bed and lies down next to Eliot, and Parker slides over to him, her breasts brushing against Eliot’s belly as she moves, sending prickles of want dancing jaggedly up Eliot’s spine. 

He feels both electrified and dishrag limp, but he tips his head down to watch Parker plunge her fangs into the swirl marked above Hardison’s left hipbone. Hardison’s hips jerk up, and he sucks in a harsh breath, and then Eliot looks at Hardison’s face and sees him go loose with pleasure, eyelashes fluttering across his cheeks, breathing a long, low moan, and it both seems to stretch out in time, go on and on, and seems like it’s over in seconds, Parker tugging her fangs free and licking at the wound, and then licking their blood off of her lips. She goes up to her knees, one leg between Eliot’s and one between Hardison’s, and Eliot feels his fangs drop abruptly and jerks himself up on his elbow.

She leans down to meet him, the soft flesh of her left breast brushing against his cheek, and he’s barely aware of Hardison beside him, moving down the bed and tugging at Eliot’s left wrist, half aware of what he’s doing, but ready for it, and ready to taste Parker, her scent, _their_ mingled scents permeating the room, and he turns his head and bites down gently. She sucks in a breath that tumbles out of her mouth in a bright, heady wail, and he feels Hardison’s fangs pierce the mark on his rib and groans around her blood in his mouth, salty and tasting faintly of some kind of flowers. She buries her hand in his hair and holds him there, and she is whining in pleasure, completely uninhibited, and he feels like he could drink from her forever at the same time that he feels the tight little snap in his mind, the way that they connect, so that he feels dragged apart by her pleasure washing through his mind at the same time as Hardison’s mouth pulls at his mark, sending electric bursts of pleasure through him just as Parker’s had, over every inch of skin, every cluster of nerves, loosening his muscles and tightening his groin and his nipples.

He knows, can feel, when to pull back from Parker, that beat of connection in his body and mind, and even as he’s licking the wounds closed, he feels Hardison’s fangs withdraw from his side, making him shudder, Hardison’s tongue closing up the wound, and the mark feels hot, like it’s been freshly branded into his skin, but not quite right, not quite done, and he lifts Parker up by the hips and settles her across Hardison’s thighs, because he knows they’re an incomplete circuit right now, humming with power, but not at _full_ power, and Hardison shoves up so that he’s sitting upright and catches Parker’s back in his splayed hands and bends her backward, fangs flashing as he plunges them into the mark on her breast. Parker’s hands lock around the back of Hardison’s neck and she makes a breathless sound that would be a scream if there were more air to it, and tension thrums through Hardison’s whole body; Eliot squirms down and around so that he can reach Hardison’s hip, and almost as soon as he tastes blood he feels it, bright and head, the feeling of that circuit closing, the powerful _snap_ of completion, washes over Eliot so strongly it’s like his first blood meal. Strength floods him, and he can see every inch of Parker and Hardison’s skin like they are glowing from the inside, can see the fine traceries of veins and arteries and muscles, and then it ebbs slightly as Hardison pulls back, licks the wounds closed, cradling Parker against his chest. 

Hardison’s eyes are glittering, Eliot can feel the power rolling off of him like a waterfall plunging down the face of a cliff, and the power pulsing out of Parker feels different, sleeker, but just as strong, and Eliot has time to wonder what his power feels like to them before the three of them collapse into a pile of limbs, splayed around and atop and beneath each other in a loose tangle, all of them breathing hard and fast.

Parker shifts first, one hand on Eliot’s chest and the other on Hardison’s, and she just drags her nails down their skin, slowly pulling herself up into a sitting position, still straddling Hardison’s thighs, her eyes bright and pale, almost seeming to glow in the golden light of the room. Hardison inhales sharply and Eliot shudders, and her lips curl into a wicked little smirk. 

Eliot can sense her hunger, the tidal pulse of her sexual need. “The other marks…?” he asks, half-unwillingly, and she shifts back to rest on her heels, her expression thoughtful suddenly.

“Why are there two?” she asks. “It would make more sense if there were only one on all three of us, all the same, or if there were three, three different marks, with each of us being marked for each other.”

Eliot shakes his head. He hadn’t thought about it, but it makes sense, if they each had two marks, but the marks individual, each one representing one of them alone, so that Parker and Hardison were marked with Eliot’s mark, and Eliot had marks for Parker and Hardison, and so on. That each mark represented one of them, instead of having just two for all three of them.

Eliot’s cock is as hard as steel, and he can smell their bodies, sweat and sex and power, and he wants them. It’s a good question, but he can hardly bring himself to focus on what it might mean while his body hums and crackles with desire.

“Should we drink from the other marks before we…” Hardison asks, and then reaches up and touches Parker’s right breast gently, barely brushing his fingertips across the taut pink of her nipple, and Parker moans, soft and high and wanting. It’s almost enough to undo Eliot’s tenuous control over his thinking mind, and he thinks, it could wait, they could do it in the morning, and then he thinks, in an odd, distant way that feels almost like it’s not his own thought at all, that if they can sense the vampires through their link marks, then maybe the vampires can also sense them. That maybe, somewhere in the Broadmoor condominiums, something is stirring, aware of the burst of power they had just created, and the short hairs on the back of his neck rise and prickle.

“There has to be a reason,” he says slowly. “One mark for the power, one mark for something else.” He looks at Parker, who is looking piercingly back at him, her gaze sharp.

“Camouflage,” she says, and as soon as she does, Eliot feels a shift in his mind, that deep sense of instinct.

“Shields,” Hardison says, and Eliot sees that his eyes are sharp as well, all his remarkable intelligence present behind his eyes. “Or something like that. Some kind of thing that will protect us from _them_ sensing us. If this is what we are meant for, some kind of protection being built in only makes sense.”

Parker eases back off of Hardison’s thighs and scoots down toward the end of the bed. Her hand strokes easily, proprietarily, along Eliot’s calf, and she lifts it, tucking his foot up, and the pain of her fangs is a little sharper there, with so little flesh between skin and bone, but it’s brief thing, and Eliot feels a pulse of power between them, and is vaguely aware of Hardison sitting up and curling around Parker’s body, until Parker lets out a little moan and arches her back, and he realizes Hardison has pressed his fangs into the spiral there. Eliot feels his fangs descend, but has no way to reach either of them, and so just shudders through the rush of it until Parker laps at his foot with her quick pink tongue at almost the same time that Hardison shifts away from Parker on the bed, his lips stained with her blood.

Parker climbs up beside Eliot and turns her back to him, one hand sweeping her hair to one side out of the way, and Eliot sinks his fangs into the spiral, her blood still like salt and flowers, and he feels Hardison’s fangs jab into the top of his foot, and that same deep pulse of power, different from the first time, contained somehow, feeling close, somehow, like it is arcing along the pathways already established by drinking from the other marks, changing them, pulling them inward. Eliot touches the curve of Parker’s hip and slowly draws his fangs out of the spiral at her back, licking the wounds closed. Hardison takes another few seconds, his hands firm and almost caressing around Eliot’s foot, and then he pulls away as well, licking blood from his lips with a little huffing sound of pleasure before he licks the wounds closed.

Parker shifts onto her other side and draws Hardison up between the two of them in the bed, and he goes down on his belly, revealing the spiral at the top of his right buttock. Eliot and Parker exchange a look, and Parker makes a lazy, easy gesture for Eliot to go first. 

Hardison has a fantastic ass, and Eliot has to remind himself that Hardison also has no experience with men to keep himself from running a hand over the curved muscle, and instead just dips down and sinks his fangs into the center of the spiral. Hardison groans and arches his hips, grinding down against the bed, which makes Eliot’s cock jerk needily as the salty copper of Hardison’s blood fills his mouth and slides down his throat. He swallows three times, four, half a dozen, and then pulls back, and before he can lick the wounds closed Parker is nudging him away and Eliot feels the _snap_ of a closed circuit again, this one different, this one like the warm, dark feeling of being enclosed, protected, and yes, this is why, because a trio of Daywalkers must radiate power, and being able to hide that power, to contain it, is vital to their survival.

Eliot thinks, somewhere very distantly, that if this is what they are really meant for, then it’s something they will have to actually do at some point, but the thought it barely tangible enough to grasp while he sees the loose spill of Parker’s golden hair lying in a sleek fan against the dark skin of Hardison ass and lower back.

Parker pulls back slowly, her tongue stroking across Hardison’s skin for far longer than it takes to simply close the pinprick holes of their fangs. 

“You both smell,” Parker breathes against Hardison’s skin, “so good. So good.”

Eliot, who feels like he’s being practically assaulted by the sight/smell/feel of them, understands exactly what she means. Hardison’s scent is hot and electrical, like a lightning strike, and Parker smells like the most elemental of spices, like something you have to taste in tiny sips or risk burning your tongue.

That pulse of power is still there, along with that sense of being enclosed that activating the second marks had given him, that sense of being… obfuscated. Eliot’s body thrums with both things, but when Parker levers herself up on one hand and touches Eliot’s thigh with the other, his skin prickles raw with want at even that mostly innocent touch, and he finds himself pushing aside the rest of it so that he can lean up, watching her face as she watches him, her eyes so dark it’s like the irises have been entirely swallowed by pupil, and when he wraps a hand around the back of her neck and pulls her mouth to his, she gasps out his name in a jumble of sound that resonates with both desire and relief. He kisses her recklessly, a little roughly, but she keeps up with him like she’d known all along how he would kiss her, teeth sliding against his lower lip with a sharp drag of bright pain, and then soft tongue stroking against that slight pain, soothing. 

Her fangs are out and Eliot tastes his own blood in his mouth, but it doesn’t make him stop, he’d known, he knows Parker, he’d known that she would be dangerous in intimacy, just like he knows Hardison won’t be the same kind of edged thing that she is. Even before all of this, he’d understood about Parker’s edges. He has edges of his own, after all. He just has more control over his than she does.

She pulls back, licking his blood off of her lips, and whispers, all her edges laid bare in her voice, “How do we do this, all three, together?”

She asks it like she knows Eliot will know the answer, and she’s right, and he wonders whether she just suspects it, or if she’d seen it in his mind at some point.

Hardison, between them, wriggles over onto his back, his cock a long, thick length lying across the slightly lighter skin of his belly. He is looking at Eliot, too, the question on his face as clear as the one Parker had asked out loud.

“It doesn’t have to be all three at once,” Eliot tells them, just to make sure they understand that it won’t change anything, that it probably won’t be all three of them every time, but both of them reach for him, Parker’s hand, already on his thigh, sliding up higher and squeezing, fingertips drilling into the muscle, and Hardison’s hand sliding across his shoulder and down his bicep, somehow managing to be tight and demanding at the same time that it’s caressing. Eliot doesn’t need to hear them say it; he feels it, too. This time at least, all three of them at once feels like the right way. “Okay,” he breathes, and then bends and kisses Hardison, his mouth demanding, but not as rough as he’d been with Parker, and Hardison’s response is all softness, slick, clever tongue, soft lips, letting Eliot lead the kiss without any kind of attempt to do anything but reciprocate.

Eliot barely has time to retreat, a question for Hardison hovering on his lips, but he bites it back for the moment, as Parker has gone for Hardison’s mouth like she’s been starving for it. He see’s the pink of tongue and the clench of jaws, but she doesn’t use her fangs on Hardison, and Eliot is dazedly grateful that she knows better and has enough control to give Hardison what he needs, that she gets that she can get blood kisses from Eliot if she wants them, but that Hardison’s too… sweet, too tender, for them, at least for now. Hardison rumbles a groan into Parker’s mouth and Parker responds by pulling away just long enough to run her tongue down the big tendon in his neck, and then to flick just the tip against Hardison’s left nipple. Hardison’s back arches, and Eliot resolves to keep firmly in mind that Hardison’s nipples are hot spots, and Hardison buries a dark hand in Parker’s golden hair, not pulling, but just tangling his fingers through it, as though to feel the texture between his fingers. She raises herself back up to her knees, her expression twisted up with heat and want and satisfaction.

Hardison pants out several harsh breaths and doesn’t break eye contact with her until Parker does it herself, turning to Eliot again, as though for direction. Then Hardison turns his gaze on Eliot as well, the same look from both of them, and Eliot feels a slow crackle and ache in the cradle between his hipbones that travels up and tangles in the root of his belly, at the base of his spine, and arcs all the way up his back at being on the receiving end of those looks.

“Alec,” he says, trying it out, finding that it fits in his mouth easily, at least here and now, and Alec’s lips twitch into a small, pleased smile, which makes it worth it just for that. “Do you want to pitch or catch?” Eliot asks.

Alec’s face twists in desire, quick and easy to decipher. “Both,” he says.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, smiling a little. “But this time, your first time…” He pauses and stretches for the right phrase, catches it. “When you’ve thought about it with men, which one is the one that lights you up.”

Alec licks his lips, gaze flickering a little, and then breathes, “With you?” he asks, and licks his lips again. “Catch,” and his dark skin hides what is almost certainly a blush, and Parker runs her hand down his chest and ribs, stroking him calm.

Then, on instinct, he turns to Parker. “What about you? Pitch or catch?”

Her lips curl into a wicked smirk that is merely confirmation of something Eliot had already guessed about her. “I’ll catch,” she says easily, not looking embarrassed at all. “I don’t have any of my gear.”

Alec makes a low huff of sound, like he’s been punched directly in the libido, and Eliot understands it, feels it the same way. He smirks back at her, and she sighs, soft and breathy, a wanting sound, even as her face lights up in a much more familiar expression of Parker-specific delight, the look she gets when she gets her way on a job when she hasn’t expected to.

Eliot gets up onto his knees and says, “Okay then, Parker, switch places with Alec.”

“Hands and knees,” Parker says at once, as though she’s bargaining, and Eliot can’t help his grin. 

“However you like it best,” Eliot says, and she grabs Alec and half hauls him up to his knees, dragging him downward a little on the bed, and crawls up to the middle of the bed, every gorgeous muscle in her back, ass, and thighs flexing as she positions herself, not even pausing as she spreads her knees wide and drops forward onto her elbows, such a blatant offer that Eliot feels his breath catch and Hardison makes a low, choked sound. She looks over her shoulder at them, face both soft and smug.

“Like this, Alec,” she says, making a little jerking motion with her chin, as though to urge him to hurry.

Alec throws a quick look at Eliot, and Eliot just nods and gestures. Alec looks a little wild around the eyes, but he slides gracefully between Parker’s spread thighs, clenching his own thighs a little to find the right height. He gasps a little, and Eliot knows his cock has just brushed up against Parker by the way that she gasps at the same time. For a long moment, Alec’s hips rock very slowly, just running the shaft of his cock against the wet and open cleft of her cunt, and then Parker says, “You can tease me next time, Alec, I promise, I won’t even complain, but I need…” her voice high and tight, and Alec’s hips dip down and he presses forward without any more need for explanation. It’s one long, smooth stroke inside, and she cries out and clutches at Eliot’s sheets, bunching them in her hands, and Alec catches her hips and holds her still on his cock, his head tipped back, breathing ragged.

“Girl, how can you be this wet and still be so tight at the same time,” Alec mutters gutturally, and Parker twists her hips, working her interior muscles if Eliot had to guess, and Alec grates out a soft sound, pulls back, and snaps his hips forward. She lets out a little shriek of pleasure, and Alec groans. 

But he also stills his hips.

He looks over his shoulder at Eliot, eyes dark, voice only slightly nervy, and says, “If you’re going to get in on this, you should probably do it now. I don’t know how long I’m going to last.”

“Trust me, you’ll last,” Eliot says, and reaches for the lube on the nightstand. “Your first time is going to feel weird enough at first to balance out some of what you’re getting from Parker.”

Alec’s teeth flash in a brief white grin. “Man, I hope so, because I’ve wanted to do this too long to want it to be all over as quick as it feels like I could go over right now.” Even as he is finishing the last part of the sentence, he leans forward and kisses Parker’s cheek, jaw, and neck. “You going to be okay with waiting for…”

“Yes,” she murmurs, and wriggles just a little. “I want it to be all three of us. I can wait.”

Eliot knee walks up the bed behind Alec and snaps open the lube. Alec’s back goes taut for a moment, and then relaxes. “I won’t hurt you,” Eliot soothes, and gives into the urge to run a hand over one muscular cheek of Alec’s ass. “It will feel weird a little at first, new, but I won’t hurt you.”

“I know that, man,” Alec says softly. “And I’ve got at least a little experience with my own fingers.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have toys,” Parker says, almost conversationally, though her breathing is still a little erratic.

“I almost have a couple of time,” Alec says. “But I actually wanted it to be… new.” He sounds a little embarrassed, but Parker just makes an interested sound, and Eliot drizzles lube onto his fingers liberally and tries to pretend that knowing that doesn’t make the idea of fucking Alec for the first time even more desperately arousing than it already had been. 

He runs one slick finger up between the cheeks of Alec’s ass, slicking up his hole, and Alec shudders, a whole body shudder. Eliot sees his toes curl, and he’s abruptly sure that this is going to go better than just well. He slicks another finger up from Alec’s perineum, leaving the tip of his finger pressing just at the clenched entrance to Alec’s body, not pressing, just rubbing, and Alec lets out a hoarse sound. He gasps in a breath, and then, shakily, manages to say, “You don’t have to be quite that careful, man.”

Eliot drizzles a little more lube onto his fingers and decides to take Alec at his word. He presses with the tip of one finger, gentle but firm, and Alec shivers a little, hole clenching for just a moment, and then he lets out a long breath and his body relaxes. Eliot’s finger slides into him with almost no resistance, and Alec’s hips jerk a little, first back, as though urging for more, then forward, pressing his own cock into Parker who makes a soft, cooing sound of delight. Eliot strokes a finger into him carefully, slowly, and then when he feels the way Alec is clenching and arching into the strokes, faster and a little harder. Alec spreads his legs a little further apart, which effectively spreads Parker wider and presses Alec’s cock deeper into her, and she whines a little.

For maybe half a minute, Eliot strokes a single finger into Alec, and Alec rocks back onto it without any kind of hesitation, rocking gently into Parker’s cunt as he moves, which makes her whimper so hotly that Alec and Eliot both groan at the sound of it, and then Eliot slips a second finger inside. Alex tenses for a moment, rhythm broken, takes a short, sharp breath, and then the taut clench of his ass around Eliot’s fingers loosens a little and he rocks experimentally back onto them both. Eliot takes advantage of the movement to twist his wrist around and stroke his fingertips along the hot, slick flesh inside until he finds Alec’s prostate, and then he grips one of Alec’s hips in one hand and drags his fingertips deliberately against it. Alec shouts, low and startled, and his hips snap forward, moving a little even with Eliot’s hand anchoring him. Parker moans and laughs at the same time, and dreamily says, “I wish I had a prostate.”

Alec stutters out a little laugh that is mostly a moan, which then becomes a full-throated moan when Eliot slides his fingers back out and then in again, dragging them along Alec’s prostate deliberately. Alec’s hips jerk again, and abruptly he is breathing out in ragged little gasps. Eliot spreads his fingers wide, stretching the tight sheath of muscle with a careful scissoring motion, then stroking in again until Alec is gasping out sounds of encouragement, the rocking of his hips becoming hard enough that Eliot’s restraining hand isn’t doing much to keep him still, and Parker is letting out short, sharp sounds of pleasure as Alec rocks into her with little jerking strokes.

Eliot adds more lube than he really thinks Alec needs, but always better too much than too little, especially the first time, and the next time Alec rocks back onto his fingers he adds a third finger, bunching them tight together, and rather than tense again or even pause, Alec just let’s out a harsh little sound like he’s been punched, and then shifts his hips in some instinctive little twist that drags the pads of Eliot’s fingertips against his prostate.

“Eliot, man,” Alex groans hoarsely, and his voice sounds absolutely wrecked. Eliot’s cock jerks between his thighs, suddenly feeling huge and throbbing and neglected. “Come on,” Alec says. “I want… I…”

“Eliot,” Parker echoes, her voice almost a plea.

Eliot hesitates for three or four seconds, unwilling to move this along too fast when Alec doesn’t know that there’s a big difference between two fingers and a cock, and then, with a flash of intuition, reaches out to catch Hardison’s mind and feels… not what he feels, not the physical sensation, but that that the stretch of three fingers, the burn of it, is _good_ for Alec, that he wants that burn, wants to feel Eliot open him up with that same kind of burn, and Eliot’s careful patience disintegrates at the rush and press of that realization into the pleasure centers of his brain. He tugs his fingers free of Alec’s ass, drizzles still more lube into his hand and slicks up his cock, and then notches his knees in between Alec’s. It will be a demanding position, but they can hardly spread Parker any wider. He presses the tip of his cock against Alec’s slicked up hole, and Alec sucks in a harsh breath, going still all at once.

Watching the blood flushed head of his cock slip between the dark cheeks of Alec’s ass is one of the most erotic things Eliot has ever seen, only made more so when Alec starts to open for him, showing him pink inside as Eliot urges the wide head into the narrow clench of Alec’s hole. Alec makes a rough sound that skirts the edges of pain, but he’s pressing back carefully, pushing himself onto Eliot’s cock even as Eliot is working it into him, making a low and needy sound in his throat. Eliot pulls back after just a few inches, mostly to spread the lube around, and Alec makes a soft, almost growling sound of displeasure. 

Parker laughs brightly, and Eliot chokes out a moan and arches his hips forward again, faster than he means to, harder, and Alec shouts, going tight and clenching and insanely good around him. Eliot goes still, waiting for Alec to adjust, listening to his fast and ragged breathing, and then Parker starts to rock back onto Alec, short, twisting little motions, and Alec huffs out a sound of shocked pleasure and loosens a little around Eliot’s cock, and then they have Alec between them, Parker rocking back onto his cock as Eliot presses forward and the rhythm makes itself after maybe ten seconds, Alec abruptly shoving back onto Eliot, tight and hot as blood and so good that Eliot bites out a sharp sound, and then snapping his hips forward, shoving into Parker’s cunt with the hot slapping sound of skin against skin.

“Yessssss,” Parker hisses, and arches her back. “Fuck him into me, Eliot,” she demands, and Eliot responds to it almost helplessly, thrusting into Alec with a rough, almost brutal stroke. Alec hitches in a breath, caught between Parker’s cunt and Eliot’s cock. Eliot catches his hips and holds him for several fast, long thrusts, and he can feel Parker rocking back onto Alec’s cock, letting out hot little sounds of pleasure, all open throated and full of long vowels and soft consonants, while Alec continues to just gasp in short, uneven breaths, his back bent forward into an arch over Parker’s shorter body so that his hands are fisted into the sheets beside hers. He is shuddering violently, but still only breathing fast and ragged, and then Eliot manages to shift up to one knee and one foot, changing the angle because Alec is taller than he is and he needs to change the angle to really make it work, and then Alec is wailing out sounds of broken pleasure and Parker and Eliot are half pinning him between their bodies because he is shoving himself forward, burying his cock in Parker’s cunt, desperate with need, and then jerking himself back onto Eliot’s shaft, the sheath of his ass clenching and tightening maddeningly around Eliot.

Parker trills out a high, exuberant cry, and Alec groans, shoving forward into her as she comes. Her arms slide out from under her and Alec rides her down, still pounding into her, and Eliot has very little option to do anything but ride Alec down after her, staying up enough to keep his weight up off of them both, one foot still firmly planted on the mattress and keeping himself angled in the way that makes Hardison bark out hoarse little cries. Eliot feels it when Hardison is going to come, he goes tense all over, his thighs trembling against Eliot’s even as he stops making any noise at all, just taut and quivering and silent under Eliot until his ass clenches around Eliot’s cock like a fist. Hardison sobs out a little helpless sound, and Eliot, growling low in his throat, doesn’t hold back, just pounds into Alec another half a dozen times, his balls slapping against Hardison’s ass, and then he shouts out his pleasure, white hot and overwhelming, crackling through him like electrical current, lighting up every nerve in his body, and when he is finally done pumping Alec full of his come, he barely has the presence of mind to roll before his arms give out and he lands on top of them both, and he tumbles onto his side, feeling dazed and almost wholly undone by what was unquestionably the best orgasm of his life.

“We didn’t even use the powers,” Parker says after a few moments, her voice low and slow and drugged sounding. Alec is still lying along her back, but up on his elbows, and she shakes her hair out of her face and turns to look at Eliot, where he’s lying beside her. “I want to come again,” she says, without any kind of shame. “I want one of you to go down on me, and I want to try to use the powers, the mind powers, I want…” 

She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t have to. She wants it all, and Eliot can feel his cock already filling again at the idea, and Alec presses his forehead between Parker’s shoulder blades, bending almost double to do it, breathing still hard, but when he eases out of her and backs up onto his knees, Eliot can still see the long, thick length of his dark cock, hard and bobbing between his thighs.

“How do you want it, who do you want where?” Alec asks gruffly, and Parker flips over onto her back, all smooth and flowing and smelling even more like spices. She cocks her knees up and plants her feet on the bed.

“All three at once, again, so Eliot needs to get cleaned up.” Eliot understands what she means at once, and immediately goes to his feet, feeling his body flowing strong and graceful as he moves, and sprints into the bathroom adjoining his bedroom to wash his cock with soap and water, and then with just clean water to get most of the soap smell off.

Alec is saying, “... never done it,” sounding both eager and uncertain, and he looks up when Eliot comes back in, his eyes on his face for a moment, and then dropping down to Eliot’s cock, measuring it with his eyes and licking his lips in what is almost certainly an unconscious gesture that makes Eliot’s blood roil in the pit of his belly and draws his balls up tight.

“We can show you how, with the link marks,” Parker says, “Like I showed you how to mesmerize with your eyes, we can show you and Eliot can let you feel how he likes it.” Her eyes are gleaming in the darkness. “It’s going to be good,” she promises.

Alec nods and licks his lips again, and Eliot says, “Parker, girl, why don’t you get up and ride my face so that Hardison doesn’t have to struggle to find a good angle,” and Parker’s smile goes wide and bright, eyes sparkling as she springs up onto her knees and scoots down the bed, patting the spot where she’d just been lounging on her back.

“Good plan, Eliot,” she says, and then both she and Alec reach for Eliot and drag him back down onto the bed on his back, in the middle, his legs spread wide. “We should try to get the mental… I don’t know what to call it, it’s not like talking, but we should get that started first, figure out how to make it go all three ways, without…” Now she pauses to lick her lips. “Distractions.” She looks at Eliot, and then at Alec, and then says, “You drank the vampire blood tonight, you were in his mind, can you reach out and do that to us?”

Alec shifts back onto his heels, his eyes still hung up on Eliot’s cock, and Eliot is secretly a little flattered, but then his gaze moves up to Eliot’s face and he meets his eyes, and there is no need to try for anything, it’s as easy as wanting to do it, and both of them blink rapidly and their minds shift and stutter as though against each other before settling into something else, something softer but deeper than Eliot has experienced before, and he can feel Alec’s craving for his cock, and gasps a little at the strength of it.

“Me too,” Parker says, her hands suddenly on both of them, resting on their chests as though she can sense the two of them in mental tandem with one another, and they both shift to look at her, and her mind is a fluid as before, but more open than Alec’s even had been, more open than Eliot thinks his own had been, and they fall into her gaze -- Eliot has a split second to think that Parker is going to be the strongest of them this way, her mental gifts the strongest -- and they are three instead of two, all of their wants laid open and bare, and Eliot suddenly knows that Parker likes bondage and a side of pain with her sex, and that Hardison is the gentlest of the three of them, and the least experienced, and then Eliot reaches for Parker and she crawls up the bed, all loose limbs and grace, until her knees press into the bed beside his shoulders, and she lowers herself down, body canted forward, one hand braced on the headboard, and she’s still dripping from Hardison, tastes of Hardison, flat metal and electric tasting, and like herself, spices, heady and intoxicating, and he flicks his tongue up once just to dip into her and taste them both together, and then up further, letting his tongue press against her clit and feeling her back arch and her mind shiver into glittering motes of pleasure, and then he uses his teeth, careful pressure, and she moans, high pitched and loud.

“LIke that, yeah, Eliot,” she says unnecessarily, but it’s still good to hear in her voice, high and taut and still edged with that tone she gets in her voice when things are going her way, almost a chirruping sound, delight and avariciousness all twisted up together into something that is quintessentially Parker. “Alec, can you…” she asks, but doesn’t finish because Eliot can sense her giving Alec silent instructions, all images and feelings reeling out, and Alec wraps a hand around Eliot’s cock and tugs it upward off his belly, stroking once, and Eliot can tell he just wants to know how it feels in his hand, and he presses permission into Alec’s mind, blanket permission to explore it however he wants, that there is no hurry, that he can keep Parker occupied for a long time, and he feels Alec’s amusement and excitement, and then both of his hands are on Eliot’s cock, wrapped around the length of it, then one hand around his balls, exploring, while the thumb of his other hand circles the glans of Eliot’s cock and precome wells up out of the slit to make things slick, and he gets a faint sense of his own scent, musky like sandalwood and something lighter, like vanilla, as Hardison bends his head over Eliot’s cock and inhales deeply.

Parker rocks her hips gently, and Eliot feels split in two, like he has enough mind and concentration to focus on both at once, neither sensation eclipsing the other, and works on her clit with his tongue and his teeth, and she shudders when he lifts a hand and slides just the tips of his fingers against the slick flesh of her opening, not inside, teasing her, because he can sense that she likes the teasing. She rides Eliot’s face with a perfect, steady rhythm, grinding down just a little when she wants more pressure, but not smothering him, her weight perfectly balanced, her body in sync with his. 

Alec slides the flat of his tongue along the head of Eliot’s cock, licking away precome, Eliot gets a stronger sense of that taste of vanilla, and then he feels Alec’s mind fracture into something hungry and needy, and Alec goes down on him, and not like a novice, but like he’s drawing what he needs from both Parker and Eliot, Eliot can almost sense the way he’s doing it, but doesn’t try to focus on it, because he’s doing it to both of them at the same time and he sees how it works, and he senses Alec’s need for some kind of feedback, the need to know that he’s doing it right as he slowly lowers his mouth down Eliot’s shaft, lips so soft, tongue dragging around the head and then pressing against the big vein at the vase, and the fact that Eliot has never been a noisy lover in the past seems vastly unimportant and he lets his throat open and the low-pitched rumble of pleasure builds in his belly and chest and travels up through his open throat and vibrates against Parker’s clit, which makes her hips shudder and jerk, and she says, “Eliot, will you bite me?” an uncertain question that he understands has nothing to do with his human teeth scraping along her clit.

Alec wraps his fist around the base of Eliot’s cock and jerks it up to meet the sleek, soft wetness of his mouth, and Eliot groans out another low sound, and the idea of biting her -- and he senses that biting and sex are for her only, not for Alec, or at least not yet -- sends tangled pleasure messages to his groin and to the base of his brain. He feels his fangs drop, and slides his tongue along her clit to pull it in, her hips move forward in cooperation, and he bites down, his fangs piercing her tender sex, one driving down on either side of her clit, and she shrieks, her nails scraping across the wood of the headboard, her hips shuddering hard, pressing forward, and he slides his fingers inside her and feels her tighten around them, clenching down tight and hot as she shudders, whining as she comes, her juices and her blood mixing in Eliot’s mouth like the world’s strongest aphrodisiac, and he feels his hips jerk up, but Hardison is there with them, not linked as closely to the act that doesn’t involve him as he is to the one he is focusing on, but aware, and he shifts his weight on the bed and bends forward, and when Eliot arches, takes most of his cock into the hot, demanding heat of his mouth, sucking hard, Eliot feels how hungry Alec is for it, how the stretch and heat and weight satisfy him, feels how he wants to be able to go all the way down, and somehow manages to fumble instructions into his mind, about how it feels the first time when it hits your gag reflex, about how to swallow around it and not to panic when he loses his air because Eliot will sense it, Eliot won’t let it go too far.

Eliot draws his fangs out of Parker’s cunt and laves at the wounds he left, Parker still shuddering in a long, debilitating orgasm, her body still rocking against his mouth, when Alec shifts up onto his knees for the angle he wants and makes an attempt to take Eliot all the way down, hesitates only for a second when he feels the head of Eliot’s cock hit the back of his throat, and Eliot does a thing he doesn’t know he can do, just presses against Alec’s autonomic gag reflex and forces it back, and Alec groans a little, a short, hoarse sound through his nose, and goes down, not stopping until his nose is pressed into the thatch of Eliot’s pubic hair, where he pauses and scents/tastes the scent of Eliot, sandalwood and vanilla, and then he swallows around Eliot’s cock, the constriction tight and perfect enough to make Eliot’s thighs shudder under Alec’s hands, and then he pulls back, shifts again, takes a short, harsh little breath, and goes back down sucking Eliot in to the hilt, his mouth so soft and hot and ravenous, his need pulsing in Eliot’s mind, but there’s a sense of holding back, too, not fast, demanding strokes, but long and slow and Alec’s tongue exploring every inch of Eliot’s cock. Eliot breathes out hard and reaches down and cups the back of Alec’s head, not pressing or even guiding, but just to feel it happening, and a bright shock of pleasure shivers through Alec’s mind at the feel of it, and Eliot senses or intuits what it means, and tightens his fingers and guides Alec into a long slow rhythm, arching his hips up enough to press deeply into Alec’s throat every few strokes, and Alec’s mind is a white wash of deep want.

Parker finally stops shaking from her climax, but is still hitching her hips a little against Eliot’s face, and she is sore and tender, but he can tell she can give him another one, that she wants to, that she wants to wake up sore and tender and Eliot goes to work on her with his mouth again, this time sucking hard at her swollen and over-sensitive clit so that she makes soft sounds that sound like protests but aren’t, little mewling murmurs, and he strokes a third finger into her, hears and feels her gasp and tighten, and finds the hotspot at the top of her clit and strokes his tongue down and over it again and again, until her hands leave the headboard where she’s been bracing herself and she curls her body into an arch to plunge her hands into Eliot’s hair, tugging at it as her fingers tangle into the strands in the way that he likes, and he’s pushing her a little harder because Alec is abruptly pushing _him_ a little harder, his mouth tight and hot around Eliot’s cock, three or four long strokes with lots of suction, and then plunging down all the way and letting Eliot’s hips jerk up into the heat and constriction of his throat, and he feels himself coming apart from the rhythm of it, and he feels Parker feeling that, and driving herself forward or letting go of whatever she’d been holding back to keep up with them, her taste and scent potent enough to set his head spinning when combined with Alec’s mouth on his cock, and his thighs bunch and tighten and start to tremble. Parker throws back her head and cries out, pulsing a kind of glad brightness into their mental mesh, and Alec tightens at the feel of it and plunges his mouth down over Eliot’s cock, swallowing around it hard. Eliot bucks up into the sensation and the crackle of imminent orgasm roosting in his balls tenses and clenches and becomes actual orgasm, and Alec pulls off just enough to catch it across his tongue, still sucking but wanting to taste, to feel the pulse of it across his tongue and Eliot lets him, though keeps his hand curled around the back of Alec’s head in a holding gesture, and then Parker is swinging her leg out from over Eliot’s face -- Eliot briefly and helplessly chases the tastes of her -- and is moving down Eliot’s body, where Alec is slowly and dazedly pulling off of Eliot’s softening cock, and Eliot is too dazzled by his orgasm to immediately figure out why, and then Parker wraps her hand around Alec’s cock, and he feels the clench of Alec’s need at base of his spine. He jerks up into a sitting position, going immediately for Alec’s nipples, having not forgotten in the frenzy of it all, and Alec tips backward, catching himself on his hands behind him and leaving his body a long, curved expanse of open flesh. Parker goes down on him at once, and Alec cries out, his need a rushing pulse in Eliot’s sense of him, and Eliot leans in and bites down on one of Alec’s nipples, twisting the other only a little roughly, and Parker tucks her hand around Alec’s balls and squeezes gently. Alec shoves a hand into Eliot’s hair and pulls him up into a hard kiss, needy and demanding and frantic, and Eliot plunders the tastes of his own come out of Alec’s mouth, and then Alec is shuddering, coming, his body jerking erratically so that Eliot has to slide an arm around him to keep him upright. Parker eases back from Alec’s cock, licking her lips and looking pleased, and Alec collapses against Eliot’s chest, panting into his neck and still shivering out little jerking motions of aftershock.

They manage to all lie down, Parker and Eliot maneuvering Alec’s still trembling body between them without any need for discussion, and they lay still and quiet for a long time. Eliot feels the slow unspooling of the mental links they had established, retreating at an easy pace, so that it isn’t an abrupt thing, a sudden severance of those ties, but a slow unbraiding of their minds, and even when they are not so tightly knit together, he can still feel them there, minds open to him if he were to seek for them.

“So that was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Parker says, voice bright and alert. She has a thigh flung over the top of Alec’s and a hand reaching further to rest on Eliot’s chest. Eliot makes an inarticulate noise of agreement and links his fingers together with Parker’s. She allows this for several seconds, and then untangles their fingers and begins to toy absently with one of Eliot’s nipples. Eliot represses a smile. He should have realized that, mind link driven sex or not, Parker is not a hand holder. He slips his hand between himself and Alec’s body, and when he brushes a questioning hand out, Alec links their fingers together and holds on tight.

They sleep like that, although when they wake, Parker has most of the blankets and Eliot’s hand is asleep from holding hands with Alec all night long.


	15. Chapter 15

Over the next two weeks, they pull two short but somewhat messy cons and one longer one that is a little more elegant.

Parker and Alec spend every night at Eliot’s apartment, until one day he wakes up there and no longer finds their toiletries and changes of clothes in his closet to be strange. He is uncommonly mellow that day, and he can’t help but notice that both Parker and Alec have been unusually compliant and cooperative on all of the jobs they’ve been handling, and he wonders what Sophie and Nate make of that.

The three of them are high on each other’s sex and blood, and Eliot should have realized that it couldn’t last.

On a Tuesday, while Parker is off doing parkour, Alec stops typing for long enough for Eliot to notice it, and turns around from where he’s doing chin ups on the bar built into the door by swapping his grip around and swinging his whole body around to face into the living room to look at Alec.

“Do you know how to use a sword?” Alec asks, expression a solemn mask.

Eliot slowly lowers his feet to the floor and grabs a towel to wipe down his chest, arms and face. “I’ve got training in short blades, twelve to sixteen inches,” he says. “Nothing longer than that.”

“But that would be long enough to sever a neck, right?” Alec asks, and Eliot feels his brows shoot to his hairline. Alec grimaces a little. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that,” he says. “I had a whole detailed presentation.”

“This is about me beheading vampires, I take it?” Eliot says, and turns his back on Alec to get a bottle of water from the fridge and to hide his expression, which he can’t quite decipher himself, but is sure Alec is likely to take as a negative.

“It’s the only way to be sure they stay dead,” Alec says. “A stake through the heart is enough for most of them, but it’s not a guarantee, and silver is supposed to poison them so that they can’t heal themselves, but that isn’t a guarantee either. If they have access to enough blood, or another, more powerful vampire’s blood, they can be saved.”

“I thought we’d decided to just stay off their radar,” Eliot says, trying to keep his voice neutral.

Alec is silent for so long that Eliot turns back to face him, just to see his expression. Alec’s face is twisted up in a kind of miserable determination. When he sees Eliot looking at him, some of the misery retreats, but the determination is still there. 

“They’re killing people, man,” Alec says softly. “If this was part of a job, you’d already be planning how to take them out.”

Eliot thinks about that for a long moment, trying to give it the weight that it actually deserves, and Alec is not wrong. But. “The mob kills people all the time, Hardison,” he says. “But we don’t go after them as a whole because it would get us all killed. We just work side jobs that get in their way.”

Alec’s eyes flash in a way that Eliot can actually feel through the link is a little triumphant. “And I don’t see why we can’t approach this the same way,” he says, and stands up from his computer chair to turn around and face Eliot on his feet. “The Broadmoor is too big for us to take on, but I’ve been doing a lot of research, and there are a lot of unaffiliated vampires or small vampire clans that don’t occupy the Broadmoor. I’ve got files, names, pictures, property titles, and I think… This isn’t a hundred percent right, because I know the Broadmoor vampires sometimes do it, but the Broadmoor vampires live in clan families with human guards and food right on hand whenever they want it, so it’s not exactly them I’m talking about right now. It’s the vampires with small clan families or the ones that fly solo that are out killing people. They visit the Broadmoor from time to time. From what I can tell, there’s a kind of tithe that they pay to operate in the city without being integrated into the Broadmoor’s ranks, but I’m not clear on what the tithe is, in terms of money or blood or anything like that. Selena’s journal isn’t clear on it, and I couldn’t glean anything specific from browsing their emails. That’s how I got pictures of them, though, and that’s how I tracked them back to names and properties, and then I used security cameras and satellite footage to watch and see what they’re up to. That’s how I know they’re killing people.” He is silent for the space of several long heartbeats. “I can take you to some of the bodies if you need to see it to believe it.” His face is washed in misery again, but that determination is still present. “We have these abilities, Eliot,” he says, slow and careful, like he’s trying to talk Eliot not _off_ a ledge, but out onto one with him. “All three of us together, and we somehow all got together in spite of the odds of that happening, and I can’t help but think that that means that we _should_ do something.”

Eliot thinks about saying, and then he thinks of the vampire in the alleyway that Hardison had staked, and realizes that it hadn’t felt like killing at all. It had been self-defense and in defense of others, but aside from that, killing the vampire had felt different, something along the lines of killing a poisonous snake. He thinks about how the vampire had looked, faintly inhuman in a weirdly fashion model way, but it’s something else really. Something he senses or had sensed about the creature. 

He feels no remorse.

Abruptly, he is thinking about the vampires in terms of a house with an infestation of termites. You don’t worry about the termites. You take action to save your house.

“This will eventually lead to the Broadmoor,” Eliot says matter-of-factly, because he knows it will. They may start small and off the beaten trail, but the trail leads to the Broadmoor eventually.

Alec doesn’t try to deny it. “But by then, we’ll have some experience, and there are a lot of ways to attack the Broadmoor. I could drain all their bank accounts in about twenty minutes. I could have arrest warrants put out on them. I could connect them with organized crime. I can make their lives hard while we make plans to take on something more sizeable.”

“Nate and Sophie are out of this game. They don’t have what we have, and that can only make them targets,” Eliot says.

“Definitely,” Alec agrees at once. “This is our own mini-team.”

Eliot sighs. “We need to talk to Parker about it,” he says.

Alec shakes his head. “Two nights ago she got up for a glass of water and caught me watching footage of a vampire chowing down on a couple of teenaged girls,” he admits. “She’s in.”

“This isn’t going to be like the cons, where we talk our way into the situation and set things up so that the mark takes a fall. This is going to be combat, Alec. This is going to be busting in doors and leaving DNA evidence on the scene, all of which could eventually tie back into us. This is going to be messy and bloody and dangerous.”

Alec nods slowly. “I can make the DNA evidence disappear,” he says. “I can keep our real information out of the hands of the police or the vampire police, or whoever might handle something like this. But I don’t have any combat training aside from what you’ve been teaching me, and I’m not sure how nerve pinches will even work on vampires. I need training. Parker needs training. I figure we work on it every time we get a spare minute, and while we’re doing that we take out the loners. Between the three of us, the loners should be safe targets and good practice.”

Eliot feels his shoulders loosen as tension eases out of them. “Then we need equipment. I should be able to handle making us some stakes. I’ve got at least one sword good enough that I’d trust it for a beheading. We’ll have to get more made. And.” Eliot thinks for a long moment. “A silver sword is impractical, the metal is too soft, but a steel sword plated in silver is something that we might want to think about.”

“Guns?” Alec asks, and then quickly, “I know you don’t like them, but if we can get rifles or shotguns loaded with silver shot, we don’t have to get quite so close and personal with them until they’re already injured.”

“Good for you and Parker,” Eliot agrees. “I’ll even take something like that just in case things go fubar. But I’m a hand to hand combatant, Alec. That is what almost all my training has been in. I’m excellent with knives, and relatively good with what you could call either very long knives or very short swords, and I have to go with what I’m good at. Do you even know how to use a shotgun or rifle?”

“No,” Alec admits. “But I’m super strong and have super reflexes, and I figure I can pick it up pretty quick. Parker, too. She’s a knife girl, did you know that?” Alec asks. “I ask, because I did not. I didn’t know she had any kind of weapons training. But she says she’s been trained in mid-sized blades, and that she’s kept in practice, though she doesn’t use them much anymore.”

They look at each other, wondering about a time when Parker had used blades on a regular basis. They won’t ask. Parker will tell them when she’s ready for them to know.

“That will give her a leg up on using stakes,” Eliot says. “You, we’ll have to train, but.” He blinks for a long moment, thinking. “I think some of this is built in to what we are. That vampire in the alley, you missed the heart the first time, but you still disabled him. Something to think about. And you nailed him once he was down. So some of this may be hardwired into the backs of our brains, the same way we were all hard wired to drink blood and the way we can mesmerize with our blood or our gazes. Speaking of which, we’re going out to get some beers tonight, because I want to practice mesmerizing people. When I do it to you, I get the feeling that I could take control if you let me, but that you could probably fight it off if you wanted to. I need to practice on regular people, and then on vampires, to really know how much help the ability is going to be. That thing the vampire in the alley did, holding the guy with his gaze and then holding him there while he mesmerized the woman he was going to drink from? I’m interested in knowing if I can mesmerize more than one target at a time.” Eliot taps the edge of his water bottle at his lower lip in thought. “And we’ll have to get you and Parker some practice blades for beheadings. I know a guy I can get real blades from, good blades, and he owes me, so I don’t think I’ll have to answer any questions about coating the blades in silver.”

“Eliot,” Alec says, voice low and hoarse. “Thank you, man.”

Without giving it much in the way of thought, Eliot closes the distance between the two of them and draws Alec into a heated kiss. “You don’t have to thank me. I probably would have worked it out on my own. If you really want to thank me, then give me everything you’ve got when we work on combat training.”

“I promise,” Alec says, pushing a hand in Eliot’s hair and pulling the tie out of it to let it fall loose around his shoulders, something that both he and Parker do all the time. Eliot has got used to buying extra hair ties and discovering discarded ones in unusual places. And to be perfectly honest with himself, he’s been wearing it down more often. Not when he’s working, but other times. Just because they seem to like it.

“One more thing,” Eliot says, though he’s tempted to pull Alec into another kiss and then maybe something more, but it’s important. “I need you to expand your searches outside of Portland. Start with major surrounding cities, looking for vampire… estates, like the Broadmoor. But I also want you to start looking for more Daywalkers. They have to be out there somewhere, and they may know things we need to know. The vampire stuff because if they have some kind of centralized… governing body, when we do finally get to the point where the Broadmoor is the next step, we need to know what might be coming after whoever took out the… the lair of this cities most powerful clan-family.”

“I’ve already started on some of it,” Alec says. “I’ll dig deeper.”

Eliot nods, and is about to lean in to kiss Eliot again when Parker rushes in the door dressed in biking shorts, wrestling shoes, and a teal sports bra, her face pink with exertion, and smiling the way she always does when she finishes her rooftop rambles. “Something else we should all start thinking about doing,” Eliot says, thinking about that.

Parker’s expression goes faintly surprised for a minute, and then fixes on Alec. “So you asked him?” She pauses for a moment at the look on Alec’s face, and then beams. “It’s a go.” It’s not a question.

“There are some things we have to do to get started on it, some training and weapons acquisitions and stuff like that, but yeah,” Alec says. “We’re going to be vampire hunters.”

Parker squeals in delight and throws herself in their embrace, slip sliding into it the way she always does, as if there is always room for three somehow in this thing, and it never takes any effort.


	16. Chapter 16

Eliot goes to home depot to buy the necessary power tools and wood, and clears out one of the guest bedrooms to set up what he needs. He buys five thousand dollars worth of Canadian Maple Leaf coins via Alec, who assures him he can do it so that it can’t be traced back to any of their accounts, and he gets to work making stakes. The coins are just an idea he had either dreamed up on his own, or maybe had read somewhere way back when, when he had been trying to track down anything that might pertain to him before the internet was really a thing, and he chooses the Maple Leafs because they have the purest silver content in the world. However the idea had come about, he gives Parker, who has the steadiest hands, a crash course in melting down and molding silver, and they end up with four plain wooden stakes each, four wooden stakes with the tips molded with silver, and about a hundred of each which they rent a carefully vetted by Alec storage facility to store them in. Eliot doesn’t know why he makes so many, except that wood breaks, and stakes seem like they might be something that the three of them will be hard on.

Eliot arranges for shotgun and rifle lessons for Parker and Alec with a former Ranger buddy of his, someone he trusts like a brother, and gets to work on contacting the weaponsmith that owes him one, and commissioning him for some very odd knives and blades. 

To his surprise, his contact, Alejandro Munez says, almost without pause, “Vampires?” making it half a question. Before Eliot can decide how he wants to answer him, Munez continues. “I provide most of the silver and steel weapons to the vampire hunters in the country, Spencer. I’ve been doing it for years. My sister, Analisa…” he trails off, and then makes a harsh noise. “I can give you other contacts for military ordinance that works well against the bloodsuckers as well as, if I can procure their agreement, and some contacts that might be able to help you with information.”

Slowly, Eliot says, “I could use the information, but I don’t know if I want a bunch of strangers knowing who I am.”

“It’s all anonymous,” Munez says. “In fact, I’ll assign you a file number to go with your order and forget that I even know your name. If you want to give me some electronic contact information others can use to get in touch with you, or you with them, electronically. The systems we use are as close to bulletproof as we can make them, and everyone uses a code name along with their file number to show that they’re supposed to be there, and to protect their identities.”

Eliot says nothing for a long moment, shocked enough at this sudden possible source of help when he’d expected nothing but a few comments about ‘decorative’ blades in a slightly snide tone from Munez, that he doesn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Muzez says, as though he understands. “It will take me three weeks to fill your order. You can contact me then, and we’ll make arrangements for you to discretely wire me payment. Then if you want to meet people that already do what it seems like you’re about to do, we can exchange electronic information then.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says finally, because he has to talk to Alec and Parker before he takes the offer, but doesn’t want to admit that he has partners. Better to let Munez think he wants to stew about it a while. “What kind of figure are we talking here?” he asks, meaning how much he’s going to end up paying for the swords.

“Fifteen thousand,” Munez says, and Eliot’s brows try to escape his face entirely.

“The silver cost alone…” he begins, not sure why he’s thinking about dickering the price tag up, but hearing himself doing it anyway.

“I don’t do this for the money,” Munez says quietly. “It’s enough to pay for the silver and my time and to put some aside to live on. Besides.” Eliot can hear the smile in Munez’s voice. “Next time I will charge you much more. You’re getting the friends and family discount, considering the fact that you are about to move into a world with vastly different rules than our own. It’s the least I can do. I only ask one thing in return.”

“Give it,” Eliot says.

“If you ever find a vampire named Javier Lumeurie, kill him for me as painfully as possible.” Munez’s voice is grim.

“I can do that,” Eliot says simply, noting the name down for Alec to research later. After he hangs up with Munez, he gets online with one of his fake ID’s and buys dulled practice blades matching the specifics he’d given for the real blades he’ll be getting from Munez as closely as possible. He pays an exorbitant amount for overnight shipping.

Two weeks into sword and gun practice -- during which Alec and Parker’s enhanced senses, speed, and strength give them endless advantages -- after giving himself a nice long time to think it out, he relays Munez’s offer over fettuccine with butter and garlic sauce. Both Parker and Alec look surprised, then suspicious, and then finally just uncertain.

“Do you trust him?” Alec asks.

Eliot replies with the complicated system the vampire hunters Munez supplies equipment for use to maintain their anonymity, and Alec thinks about that for a while. “More help is better,” he sizes finally, twirling pasta around his fork. “And besides that, I can keep us safe in any computerized system. Better just one of us that your friend knows about though,” he says.

Parker nods her agreement. “From Selena’s journal, all the vampires that have encountered Daywalkers have encountered them solo, which probably means that the Daywalkers themselves choose to work solo, trading information back and forth this way, but when they close in and target a vampire, only that Daywalker knows his target. There’s no chance of them giving each other up this way. It’s a good idea to let them think of you as one of them, and keep Alec and I secret.” She tips her head slightly, as if in thought. “It will come out eventually. Some kind of surveillance will catch us on tape or a target we’re after will get away from us, and there will be stories. But not for a while. Best until not after we take care of the Broadmoor.”

“Okay,” Eliot says. “I’ll have Munez hook me up into their network as soon as the blades are done and I wire him the funds for them.”

“And sort of speaking of networks,” Alec says, looking down at his plate for a long moment, before looking up to Eliot and Parker. “I have a file on a potential target two inches thick that I think might be our first mark. Preys on working girls. I have good quality pictures of him with a couple of the victims, and police statements from the other girls that have seen him in their territory corroborate the pictures. I used facial recognition software tied into local law enforcement and federal law enforcement, and I think he’s a newbie. His name is Cody Randell, and he spent an two year stretch in jail less than a year ago for beating up a working girl badly enough that she was willing to pick him out of a line up and go to court against him. It must have been bad, because first offenders that beat up prostitutes don’t usually get quite that much jail time or ten years of probation. He trolls Cecil and Saint Lawrence, and I have all pertinent info on his car. From what I’ve been able to find out about him via Broadmoor’s network, he’s an accidental turning. Usually, the vampire drains the human near to death, feeds the human their blood, the human is feral for a few days or weeks, and then becomes a functioning member of vamp society. Cody got in a lucky strike with a knife while he was dying, and the vampire who was killing him was impressed enough to turn him instead of killing him. Which they probably regret now, because exsanguination isn’t exactly a common cause of death, and he’s not that careful with what he does with the bodies afterward.”

“Sounds like something we might be able to take care of with what we have on hand,” Eliot says thoughtfully. “How often is he killing.”

“They’ve only found three bodies, but if I had to make a guess, man, I’d say at least every other night. The missing persons list for those two areas is as long as my arm, and that’s not counting any working girls nobody might have filled out paperwork on.”

“How do we figure out which area to patrol?” Parker asks. “Does he have a pattern?”

“Not exactly. I went by his place a week ago and put a tracker on his car.” Alec looks like he’s waiting for the fallout from that, but Eliot just shakes his head, and Parker chuckles.

“Let one of us know next time you decide to do something like that,” Eliot says, but without heat. He knows his partners, and they each have their own ways of doing things. “This brings up something I’ve been meaning to talk to you two about but haven’t made time for yet. Body armor. They’re a lot harder to kill than we are, and it could be a huge tactical advantage.”

Alec nods thoughtfully, but Parker frowns. “I’m at my best when I can move freely. If you want to get me something that will protect my vitals without hindering my flexibility, I won’t try to talk you out of it, and I’ll try it out at least once before I decide to use it or not.”

“Fair enough,” Eliot says, not liking it much, but knowing that she’s right. Part of Parker’s innate style is a smooth and slithering kind of grace that neither Eliot nor Alec can duplicate. She’s all like water running over smooth stones, fast and agile, and taking that away from her would limit her potential.

“I think he’ll go out tonight,” Alec says, toying with the remains of the pasta on his plate. “His car hasn’t moved in two days, so he’s probably pretty hungry.”

Eliot arches both brows. “I would have made a lighter meal if I’d known we were going to be fighting.”

Alec waves it away. “It’s only seven, and he never goes out trolling before midnight. We’ve got time to let it settle. But I thought I’d let you know now so that we can gear up however you think will work best and then practice a little before we go.”

“Which brings me to something I did,” Parker says, semi-casually, her gaze darting from Alec to Eliot. She stands up from the table and glides over to the closet she’d taken over for her rappelling gear and opens it up. From inside, she pulls out a set of black chaps and a closely cut leather jacket, clearly meant to go together. “It’s not body armor, but I did some custom work on it, and there is some added protection in the places where the vampires might go for a bite. Thighs, wrists, elbows. I’ve already used mine a little during practice, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t hinder me any more than I can handle.” She walks over to Eliot and hands the leathers over. “And this, because our throats are our most vulnerable area.” She unhooks a linked chain gorget from around the top of the hanger and hands it to Eliot, too. Eliot drapes the leathers over a chair, and tugs his hair out of the way, tugging the gorget up to fasten it around his neck. It is snug around his throat, and then looser down the sides and front of his neck. “It’s silver plated steel, so if they try to bite you, it will hurt them,” she says.

“Where did you find contacts to make something like this?” Alec asks, and takes his leathers and collar as she grabs them from the closet and passes them to him.

She smiles sunnily. “At a company that makes quality reproductions of period armor for the SCA and Renaissance Faires,” she says easily. “I did the silver plating myself. The leathers were easy. Just a custom shop that designs motorcycle leathers.”

Alec hooks his gorget around his neck, shifts it so that it sits comfortably, and rolls his head on his neck experimentally. “Yeah, okay. I can fight in this,” he says.

“Try on the leathers,” Parker chirps, and then makes another trip to the closet to fetch a set that must be her own. “Let’s make sure they fit, and I figure if this works, we should be able to outfit ourselves entirely in leather and wear silk undergarments to keep us warm or cool, and maybe only need a little bit of Eliot’s body armor.”

They help each other into the chaps, which have buckles instead of zippers, all made of silver plated steel according to Parker, and then shrug into the jackets on their own. However Parker had managed to get their sizes, she’d done a really good job at it. The leather is tight enough to be fitted, but loose enough to move in, and Parker has loops sewn into the jackets and the chaps for stakes. “I wasn’t sure where else we would carry them,” she says, shrugging. “I’ve got boots on custom order with sheathes sewn in suitable to carry a stake in each, but they’re not in yet.”

Her gaze is faintly avaricious as she looks them over. “You both look like badasses,” she says, licking her lips.

“This actually might work for body armor for right now,” Eliot says. “Better than nothing, to start off with, and then once we get in touch with other hunters, we’ll find out what they use. The gorgets are a stroke of genius.”

Parker grins smugly.

They do a little sparring, shoving the dining table back against one wall and the couch back against the other to give them room, and they all seem to do okay in the leathers. They’re a little stiff with newness, but that will work itself out in time, and more importantly, Eliot doesn’t feel like the can’t do anything in the leathers that he would be able to do without their protection. They fill the loops with stakes and practice drawing them quickly, and Eliot gets his one good sword out and buckles it to his belt and thigh for a left handed draw. The guns all have carry straps, and the jackets are tight fitting enough that none of the straps tangle or twist up on them with the guns in place.

Parker and Spencer tie their hair back out of their faces, and then they all crowd into the bathroom to look at themselves in the mirror behind the sinks.

“We need motorcycles,” Parker says thoughtfully. Eliot arches a brow at her. “They would make the gear look right, but also because a fast getaway and the ability to split up to throw off a tail could be useful.”

Eliot looks at Alec. “Man, I have no idea how to ride a motorcycle, but if we talk it out and decide it’s best, I’ll learn, I guess.” He doesn’t look worried about the possibility. “For the moment, though, my van is rigged up with all the fancy upgrades. After Lucille…” He gives them both frowns. “Well, after, I went in for all the upgrades. Armor plating, bulletproof glass, built in satellite uplink so computer access and scrambling will always be a go, and all the bells and whistles. She should do until we get things set up how we want them.”

“Besides,” Eliot says. “Bikes would make it kind of obvious that there were more than one of us. At first it might not matter, but as we move up the food chain and gain more attention, if we have to flee the scene from someplace, bikes will give them a chance to make a headcount.”

Parker looks disappointed, but doesn’t actually argue it. “The bikes would have just been for the coolness factor,” she admits with a little smirk.

Eliot leans down to kiss her forehead. “The leathers were a brilliant idea and, and the gorgets go a step beyond that.”

She smiles, looking smug. She has two intricately decorated knives belted at her waist, one on either hip, each one about eight inches long. “Let’s get the guns broken down and loaded with silver shot,” she says. “It’s almost eleven.”

It takes them half an hour to load the guns with their small supply of specialized ammo -- Eliot is going to have to find out if Munez supplies specialty ammo as well, or if he knows someone who does. The fifty rounds they have are all hand loaded by Eliot, and he can do it if he has to, but hand loading takes a lot of time, and he’d have to set up some permanent space for it somewhere in the apartment. Easier, if a bit more expensive, to find a source, especially one that might have the background to make the ammo more dangerous to vampires.

They are talking about the amount of weaponry they’re going to have to work up to once they start taking on more than just solitary vamps when Hardison’s laptop let’s out a low series of tones.

“It looks like our boy Cody is on the move,” Hardison says, and moves to inspect his laptop screen. He picks up a handheld tablet and shifts the tracker data onto it, silencing the alarm. “Can’t tell where to, yet, but we should get started tracking him.”

He gives Eliot and Parker a grim look. “Are we all ready to do this?” he asks. “For real.”

Eliot gives a sharp nod and Parker grins maniacally. Hardison passes the tablet to Parker and says, “Eliot, you drive. You’re trained for this kind of thing,” and hands him his keys.

Without further conversation, they exit through the side door and arrange themselves in Hardison’s van. Eliot can feel the thrum of energy buzzing between the three of them, excitement and nerves, and he pulls out of the parking lot and follows Parker’s directions called out from the back seat. It looks like he’s going toward the Saint Lawrence area tonight, and Eliot is glad. Cecil is a busy street, even if you don’t count the working girls, just traffic alone. Saint Lawrence is in a lower end section of town, and traffic will be lighter, the potential for witnesses lesser. Still, they leave the guns tucked into the floorboards. The guns are for places where they might need them for multiple targets, and the quieter they can keep this first run, the better it will be.

“So, do we take him out before he can pick out a target, or do we wait to make sure he plans to kill someone?” Parker asks.

Eliot looks at Alec, who shrugs. “I’m sure of my data. He’s already a killer. If we can interrupt him before he kills anyone else, that’s ideal.”

“Also eliminates the potential for witnesses,” Eliot says. “Depends a lot on whether he cruises to pick up a girl, or parks somewhere and goes on foot.”

“Goes on foot,” Parker says casually. “He wouldn’t want to get blood all over the inside of his car, and all the bodies that have been found have been dumped in empty buildings.” She’s tapping at Alec’s handheld tablet. “Here’s his mugshot from when he was in jail,” she says, and hands the tablet up to Alec, who holds it for Eliot so he can get a good look. “The police have found clothes fibers and the reports note the exsanguination, but no DNA evidence has been located at any of the scenes.”

“So he dumps them?” Eliot asks, as Alec passes the tablet back to Parker.

“I don’t think so,” Alec says. His expression is intently focused. “I don’t think vampires leave DNA evidence. I don’t think they shed skin cells or hair the way a human would. I’m not sure about fingerprints, but those are produced by natural oils in the skin, so that also might be something that stops happening when they die. You remember the way that first vampire looked,” Alec says. “Like he was put together in a perfect imitation of a human, but there were still things off about him. His skin wasn’t right, wasn’t human looking, and.” Alec pauses, like he’s trying to think how to say something. “Just. He didn’t look right. Not exactly wrong. Surely okay enough to pass for human in the dark. But something was off with him.”

“But he bled,” Eliot says. “That has to leave some kind of DNA evidence.”

Alec shrugs one shoulder. “Decomposed blood, maybe, without any clear DNA markers. Or maybe the markers of the woman he was drinking from. I think that’s why they have to drink so often. Their bodies are dead. They have to be getting regenerative energy from someplace. I think they get it from blood.”

“He’s turning off,” Parker says. “Saint Lawrence and Leopold Avenue. That area is a mishmash of old and new warehouses.” She is silent for several seconds. “He’s stopped. Parked on Leopold.”

When Eliot pulls up behind the car, the engine is still pinging, though the vampire is nowhere in sight. He parks, and they all get out.

“Aren’t we supposed to be able to sense them?” Parker asks, brows furrowed.

“Distance may be a factor. The working girls all cluster on Saint Lawrence,” Eliot says. “Let’s head that way.” Even as he’s saying it, he’s stretching out with his mind the way he had done when he had first shown Parker how to mesmerize, and he feels the flutter of something dark flicker across his consciousness. “I’ve got him,” he says. “Stretch out like you’re going to try to mesmerize someone, and just let your mind feel around. I can feel him like a dark spot flickering in my brain.”

He feels them both attempting to do that even as they follow Eliot as he crosses Leopold Avenue and makes his way up Saint Lawrence. They are moving quickly, but not quite running. Alec says, “Okay, yeah,” like he’s got a lock on Cody.

A few seconds after that, Parker says, “Ew. He feels gross.”

Glancing back, Eliot sees her expression twisted with disgust. Eliot himself can feel the darkness and violence associated with the feel of the vampire, but he wouldn’t have said that he feels ‘gross.’ He thinks again that Parker is going to be mentally the strongest of them, though it may express itself in strange ways until she develops some kind of code to categorize what she can do.

“He sees a girl in one of the doorways, smoking, about forty yards ahead of us,” Parker says, and Eliot’s suspicions are pretty much confirmed by that. He gets no sense of what the vampire might be seeing or doing, just that he’s moving. “We should catch up.”

They aren’t that far behind the vampire, maybe fifty feet, and if he’d sensed anything at all amiss, he’d have seen them and recognized them as a threat, but all his focus seems to be concentrating on finding someone to feed off of, and he doesn’t look back even when the three of them break into a run, more or less quietly, thanks to their heightened physical abilities, but with a definite jingle in counterpoint from the collars. The vampire still doesn’t look back.

Parker says, “I”m going to see if I can get her to move on,” and slows down just a little, falling a few steps behind as she focuses on the mind of the woman she can apparently sense further ahead. Eliot can’t sense anyone but the vampire. But a moment later, a young, tousle haired Asian girl leaves an inset storefront and starts making her way down the sidewalk toward where there is a streetlight and a handful of people. Parker catches back up with them.

“We need to get him off the street,” Alec says. “Can you convince him to duck down an alleyway. Maybe make him think he senses prey there?”

Parker says nothing, but slows a little again, and Eliot can sort of sense the fluidity of her mind again, not a command, but a suggestion, a teasing little hint of suggestion.

Ahead of them, the vampire pauses at the mouth of an alleyway and then raises his face to the air to inhale, sniffing like a dog. He takes an uncertain step in that direction, his eyes seeming to scan the darkness, and then turns down the alley with a more decisive motion.

“Parker, you keep fucking with his head, just keep him distracted. Alec, you come at him from the front with a stake, or from the side if you can. If I’m actually going to behead him with this sword, I have to do it from either behind or the side, so I’m going to need a distraction.”

Alec tugs a stake free of one of the loops sewn into his chaps, and Eliot loosens his blade in his scabbard and tugs it almost silently free. They are less than fifteen feet behind him, and his steps are slowing as he nears the middle of the alley and finds nobody there to feed on. Parker darts ahead of Eliot and Alec, both of them whipping their heads around in surprise when she does, and then she’s only five feet away from the vampire. 

“Hey, there,” she says from the shadows along one wall, blending in fairly well in the dark leathers except for her pale face and hair. “You looking for someone?”

The vampire turns back to her, a wide and rather charming smile on his face, and says, “I might be. If you have the time and are looking for some company.”

That had not been the kind of distraction Eliot had meant he thinks a little sourly, but now that it’s there... He turns to Alec and gives him a quick little nod.

Alec creeps along the wall opposite the alley from Parker on cat feet and circles the vampire, stake held firm and steady in his hand. They had talked about this. Eliot doesn’t need a clean kill strike, although that is always going to be their best bet. He just needs the bloodsucker on the ground where he can get his whole body into the motion of the short blade.

“I’ve got some friends,” Parker says in what is almost a coo of invitation, and the vampire looks delighted. He steps toward her, and then pauses to sniff the air again, like a dog, and then takes a single, wary step back. 

Hardison plunges his stake into the vampire’s side, under the ribs and angled up toward the heart. Parker pulls one of her own stakes out and lunges for his midsection on the left, her stake also angled up. The vampire makes a long, keening sound of pain, and Eliot steps in, bracing his feet lightly, and swings the blade cleanly and deliberately through the vampire’s neck. Blood wells up out of the severed neck as the head falls to the ground, but the blood is thick and flows slowly, like there’s nothing driving the force of it through the things body. It’s viscous and looks closer to black than red in the dim light of the alley.

Almost at the same moment, Alec and Parker tug their bloodstained stakes free of the body, and it drops to the ground in a loose slump.

The three of them are barely breathing hard.

“There’s no dumpster in this alley,” Eliot notes, looking up and down the length of it.

“Just drag it to the east end of the alley and let the sun take care of it,” Alec says. “They’ll find his clothes and wallet and shoes, but once the sun hits it, all the organic parts will burn to ash.”

“I didn’t know that,” Eliot says, complaining a little. 

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think about it until just now,” Alec says. “I mean, I read about it, but I didn’t really connect it to how to get rid of a body after we do this.”

The three of them drag the body, with Eliot carrying the head by the hair, and down to the east end of the block of warehouses. They all back up to other, older warehouses, and Eliot doubts anyone will discover the body before sunrise takes care of it for them. They survey the scene, Alec taking special care to scout for video cameras. They all have a little blood spatter on them, but not much and the leather hides most of it. In contrast to that, they are all three carrying very bloody weapons.

Parker wipes her stake most of the way clean on the vampire’s shirt, and Alec does the same. Eliot follows suit afterward, though he’ll have to give the blade a real cleaning later. They tuck their weapons back into their clothes and take a circuitous route back to the van, staying in the shadows and moving fast, their footsteps almost silent on the concrete.

They don’t talk as they make their way back to Eliot’s apartment, but Eliot himself is feeling a quiet, triumphant kind of euphoria, as though this part of it, like all the rest, wakes something in the the hindmost portions of his brain, something like satisfaction mixed in with some kind of feel-good chemical, dopamine or something like that. It feels a little like working a job with the rest of the team and taking down the bad guys, but stronger and deeper. He feels no remorse, no uncertainty, and understands that this is what he was meant for, what all three of them were meant for, and is surprisingly okay with it.

Once inside, they wipe down their leathers to get the blood off of them, and Eliot takes care of his sword, while Parker and Hardison rinse the viscous blood off of their stakes and come to the conclusion that their stakes are always going to be stained with blood after they use them.

“I can stain and seal them,” Eliot suggests, as Parker studies her stake, her nose wrinkled.

“Maybe,” she says. “Otherwise I think each one is going to be good for only one use. I can smell the blood on it still, and if I can smell it, I’m betting any vampires we’re after will be able to smell it, too.”

Eliot nods. “I’ll start work on them tomorrow,” he says. “We’ll have to remove and remold the silver on the ones that we modified.”

“Live and learn, man,” Alec says, and puts his stake down on the kitchen counter. He begins stripping off his leathers, which Parker takes from him and hang neatly in the closet. When they’re all back down to regular clothes, Alec asks, “Do either of you feel a little bit like superman right now.”

Eliot speaks Alec, and knows what he’s talking about, so merely nods. Parker tilts her head thoughtfully, but then nods, too. “It’s because we’re finally doing what we’re supposed to be doing,” she says. “Like it gives you a little high, some kind of brain chemistry reward system.” She glimmers a little smile at them. “Right now I just want to take you both to bed and ride out the feeling.”

“No arguments here,” Alec says, smiling faintly. Eliot, his mind still half on the problem of the stakes, feels himself nodding anyway.

“Next time, we drink from it before we kill it,” Parker says, looking like she isn’t entirely thrilled by the notion, but thinks it’s necessary. “Eliot and me, anyway,” she adds. “Alec has already tasted vampire blood. We don’t know what kind of advantages it will give us.”

Eliot considers that, and then nods his agreement. All the information they’ve managed to accumulate indicates that a Daywalker drinking vampire blood is what brings their heightened abilities online. If there is another level of abilities they can reach by doing the same, it’s worth a shot at least.


	17. Chapter 17

Eliot is thinking about starting to put together a way to bring up Parker’s more effective mind control abilities, but before he manages it, Parker is in his arms, her body moulded to his, and she’s nuzzling the side of the neck just under his ear, where Eliot has a sensitive spot she’d sussed out within days.

“Eliot,” she purrs, lips whispering across that sensitive spot. “I want to see Alec fuck you.”

Eliot glances up at Alec, and sees both uncertainty and desire on his face. They haven’t done it that way yet, partially because Alec is always up for catching, and partially because it’s been a long time for Eliot, and Alec doesn’t have any experience. Mostly, though, it just hasn’t happened because there is so much else to do that none of them really think about what they haven’t done yet.

“Alec can fuck me any time he feels like it,” Eliot says, lobbing the ball firmly into Alec’s court, not wanting to press for anything Alec may not be willing to do yet.

“I want to see it,” Parker repeats, and twists around to look at Alec. “Do you want to do it?”

“Yeah,” Alec says gruffly. “I’m just not sure how it works from the other side, and I don’t want to fuck it up.”

“I’ll go first,” Parker says, lips quirking. “Give you a demonstration, get him ready for you.”

Eliot feels his whole body react to that, skin breaking out in goosebumps. This is also the first time Parker has volunteered to bring any of her toys into play, and Eliot knows from glimpses of her mind during sex what kinds of toys Parker likes.

She turns back to Eliot. “Can I?” she asks.

“You can also fuck me any time you feel like it,” Eliot says, cock firming up in his jeans. “As for the other stuff, we’ll have to take it on a case by case basis. I don’t have a lot of experience with a lot of your… equipment.”

Parker looks delighted. “Something simple, this time, just to see if you like it,” she says. “Something you can get out of if you find out that you don’t.”

Eliot swallows hard, but nods his agreement.

“Come to bed,” she says. “I’ll get my stuff.”

Alec and Eliot exchange looks that are equal parts desire and apprehension, but head to the bedroom, while Parker heads into the guest room that hadn’t been taken over with weapon making equipment. They undress each other, because that’s something that Parker is impatient with, but both Alec and Eliot like, the slow uncovering of skin, running fingertips and lips along newly bared patches of flesh, like the slow unwrapping of an unexpected gift.

Parker is a rip the paper off all at once kind of girl, but Eliot and Alec like to linger over collar bones and nipples and long lines of muscle. By the time they are both undressed, they are breathing hard, Alec on his knees and mouthing Eliot’s hipbone with just a hint of scraping teeth, Eliot’s hand resting lightly on the back of Alec’s head, because Alec likes the way it feels to be either guided or controlled, depending on his mood.

Parker enters the room with a black leather trunk with a silver lock plate on the front of it, and positions it at the end of the bed. Eliot and Alec turn toward her, watching, curious, excited and a little unnerved, feeling those things from each other in their minds. Parker’s mind is lit with excitement and elation and she feels steady, like she’s already sure of what they will like and isn’t worried about pulling out anything that might freak them out. Her steadiness actually steadies both of them, and they step closer while Parker uses her lockpicks to unlock the trunk, rather than anything as plebian as a key, and tips open the lid. The interior of the trunk is broken up into compartments, things organized and easy to get to.

She pulls out a pair of leather straps ending in in wide leather cuffs, which she tosses into the center of the bed, and then pulls out what is clearly a dildo harness for herself. She lifts the compartment the two things had been nestled into, revealing another one underneath, and lets her fingers slide over a collection of dildos that range from small and compact, to bigger than Eliot or Alec, and both of them are pretty well hung. They are in a variety of shapes and sizes and colors, and she picks a slim red one out and tosses it onto the bed with the harness. Eliot, looking at it, sees that it’s got a section of nubby little bumps on the end, the end that will fit into the harness, and guesses they are for Parker’s pleasure rather than for his.

She also pulls out a bottle of lube and tosses it onto the bed.

“Just this for now,” she says, looking up at Eliot with a question on her face, open and relaxed, but carefully deliberate, as though she’s asking for his permission without any kind of concern about whether or not he’ll give it.

Eliot nods… there had never really been a chance that he wouldn’t give it, not for what he recognizes to be easy toys, things made for beginners.

She grins at him, and then rises to her feet to walk over and kiss him hotly, her fangs darting out just long enough to stab into his lower lips, which she sucks on gently, and then heals up with a slide of her tongue.

“So, I did a little work in here,” she says, sounding marginally less certain now, still not worried, but like she’s admitting to something she had been keeping to herself. She shoves back the covers on the bed, and gestures. “You’ll have to get down on your knees to see it.”

Eliot drops to his knees, and sees immediately what she’s talking about. There are a variety of sturdy metal rings affixed to the bottom edge of the bed frame at different points. “There are some at the top, too,” she says. Eliot gets to his feet, his skin prickling with a faint edge of uneasiness, but mostly with just interest. He wants to know this about her. He’d caught some of it from her mind, but nothing very specific, and he’s not at all afraid. She would never in a million years do anything to him that he tells her he doesn’t like. 

Alec picks up the dildo off the bed and fondles it thoughtfully, fingertips running over the slightly ridged length of it, and then investigating the nubby little bumps on the end that will fit into the harness. His eyes are alight with desire and interest, and Eliot realizes that Alec, though he has no experience with it, it’s extremely interested in it. Alec picks up the leather with the manacles attached, explores them with his fingertips, and finds little buttons on the edges that make them spring open.

Ah, so that’s what she meant when she’d said it would be something he could get out of if he didn’t like it. Good to know.

But he doesn’t anticipate having to use them. His skin is prickling with the idea of Parker tying him down and fucking him while he’s spread open for her, and while Eliot has never really thought much about bondage one way or the other, he’s thinking about it now. He wonders if they’ll tie Alec down. He wonders in Parker likes to be tied down.

“Okay?” Parker asks, but he feels her reaching out in the link, and he knows she knows that it’s okay with him.

“Just tell me how you want me,” he says, and Parker lets out a soft whoop of delight, and sweeps everything from the center of the bed off to one side, except for the dildo, which Alec is still holding.

“On your back, in the middle,” she says, her voice vibrating with anticipation that he can feel in his mind like heated syrup.

Eliot puts himself into the center of the bed and Parker picks up one of the leather strands with the cuffs attached and crawls up his body to straddle his chest, reaching up above his head, one end of the leather in her hands. He can feel her doing something with it, tying it to one of the sturdy rings that now line the underside of his bedframe. Then she takes the other strap and does the same with it. 

“You saw how they unsnap,” she asks, her face a little fierce with her lust, and Eliot just nods. “Not that it matters. With your strength, I think you could probably snap the leather if you really wanted to. Scoot down just a little.”

Eliot scoots down.

Gently, almost reverently, Parker clicks open one of the cuffs and closes it around his right wrist. She waits for a moment, watching him, and Eliot tugs at the restraint, finding his arms pulled up slightly over his head and stretched wide open. He gives her a little nod, and she smiles fondly at him, and catches his other wrist and snaps the cuff into place.

Eliot’s breath catches a little in his throat at the feeling of being tied down, a momentary burst of uncertainty, but it fades quickly as he flexes his arms and feels the stretch of his muscles, and finds it to be… good. No, not just good. Exhilarating. A faint smile touches Parker’s lips and she leans down and kisses him gently.

Then she stands up and strips with inhuman speed. She picks the harness up from the side of the bed, and gives Alec a little gimme gesture with the fingers of one hand. Alec hands the red dildo over, and she pulls the harness into shape with the ease of long practice, and slides the dildo into place through the slot in the center. Then she bends and steps into it, pulling it up over her long, muscled thighs, adjusts it with that same kind of ease, and pulls the ends of it behind her and Eliot hears her buckling it in place. She twists her body a little, like she’s just stretching to see that everything feels right, and then she adjusts the dildo itself, reaching between the red material and slipping her fingers down to spread the downy golden curls of her pubes out from between the dildo and her body. Eliot can see the way it must ride up against her clit, the nubby little nobs on that end giving her something to ride up against while she rides into him.

She smiles in satisfaction, her eyes roving over Eliot with something that is definitely like greed, and then she scoops up the tube of lube and crawls up onto the end of the bed. She taps Eliot’s thighs lightly, one and then the other, and says, “Spread.” Sweat prickles at the small of Eliot’s back and his balls draw up tight against his body. He spreads his legs, putting his feet flat on the surface of the bed. Each movement tugs at the cuffs around his wrists, pulls the muscles of his arms and chest taut. He shudders at the feel of it, caught up partly in his own desire, but getting at least as much from her, along with excitement and fascination from Alec. He breathes hard as he watches her pop the top of the lube open, and drizzle it onto her fingers.

She slides two of her small fingers gently down the crack of his ass, getting him slick, and then, without warning, slides one finger inside, quick and aimed like she knows exactly what she’s doing, so that the tip of her finger slides across his prostate, and Eliot chokes out a brief sound of shock and pleasure. Her hands are really small, one finger giving him just the ghost of a stretching sensation, no pain at all, and he feels his face, neck and chest flush with pleasure and anticipation. She teases him for just a minute, fingertip slipping across his prostate steadily enough that Eliot’s hips start to rock a little in time with the motions, and then she pulls her finger free, and drizzles more lube onto her fingers. She presses in with two fingers this time, and it stretches a little harder, but there is still no pain, nothing like the kind of burn he has experienced in the past when he’s been fucked, and she glides her fingertips across his prostate once, pressing hard enough to send white heat pooling in Eliot’s belly and causing him to flex hard against the restraints holding his arms to the bed. Then she tugs her fingers apart, stretching him expertly, occasionally pausing to nudge his prostate to make him gasp, and then scissoring her fingers again, pulling him open, and he can feel himself relaxing around the invasion, his thighs quivering and his belly clenching with want, but his hole loosening.

“Eliot,” she murmurs, and he can hear the gratitude and wanting in her voice. “You look so good like this. All of our muscle tied down and taking it.”

Eliot shudders full body, and Parker tugs her fingers free of him -- he gasps a little in disappointment -- but then she shifts up onto her knees and squeezes lube into her palm, and he watches her slick up the dildo, his breath short and hitching, and he can feel something like avarice and possession in her mind as she looks at him like this, and, in a burst of insight, understands that part of it, for her, is being given free reign to do with as she pleases, and in another brief moment of illumination, realizes that he _wants_ her to be able to do as she pleases with him, wants to give that to her because she wants it, but also because… because the idea of giving up control in this situation feels almost like a kind of relief, draining tension out of his body and his mind, feels like letting himself be taken over for just a little while, long enough not to have to worry about anything at all.

Then she is stretching out over him, and he feels the tip of the dildo brush against his hole, press there for a long moment as Parker rocks her hips, easing it inside, and there is a little burn this time, but it’s brief and soothed away immediately by all the lube. He hears himself say, “God, Parker,” with real surprise, as he hardly ever talks during sex, and she beams down at him, her face alight with pleasure, and rocks gently into him, several short, sweet strokes that all glance across his prostate, until the dildo is buried all the way inside him. She pauses for a moment, her hands curled around the tops of his shoulders, and grinds down, her face going soft with pleasure, and then she draws back and then inside again all at once, letting out a soft gasp as her end of the dildo presses against her clit.

“Okay,” she says, voice trembling slightly. “Are you ready.”

“Yeah, do it,” Eliot breathes, and she pulls back and then shoves back inside all the way, the ridges of the dildo inside him bumping along his prostate in an amazing ripple of pleasure, and she pauses one more time to grind up against him, working herself on the nubby parts of the dildo, and then she is fucking him, fast, hard strokes that make him clench his hands into fists and tug against the restraints, but not to get away, just to feel them there, and he feels her feeling his pleasure in them, and her excitement skyrockets. He feels her come, a slight twisting jerk of her hips, but she doesn’t stop fucking him through it, the dildo dragging along his prostate and dragging stinging sparks of pleasure up from the base of his spine to tangle between his hipbones. He wants her to touch his cock, but is breathing too hard to ask for it, his balls clenching and twisting with need, and he is shocked at how close he is, how quick he had come so close, and Parker moans out another orgasm, which makes Eliot groan with need.

She doesn’t stop, though, and she doesn’t touch his cock.

Instead she leans forward over his body and finds that sensitive spot beneath his ear, and a moment later her fangs sink into it, not deep, only the briefest moment of pain, and then his body arches with pleasure, going tight and needful, and she sucks hard at his neck and he feels his balls clench in rapture and relief, and then he is coming without her ever touching his cock, just the dildo dragging against his prostate and her fangs sending waves of pleasure crashing through every nerve in his body, and it seems to go on for a long time, wave after wave of pleasure, and then it’s over and he goes limp while she licks his neck quickly and stills her hips, and then kisses him with something like ownership clenching in her mind, and Eliot tastes his own blood in her mouth and relaxes into that feeling of ownership, falls into it, and realizes he’s reflecting it back at her, that this is more than he’d ever thought it would be, that it means more, that the three of them are linked together more tightly than anything they’d researched had indicated, that their bond is deeper and stronger, and it doesn’t bother him at all to be so closely interwoven with them, that it makes him better, makes them all better and stronger, and that if he’d known this the first time he’d seen the mark on Parker’s back, if he had understood, all that time he had wasted in fear.

Parker pulls back from him slowly, her eyes heavy lidded, her body half sprawled on top of him. “Eliot,” she says softly, with amazement, and then she smiles, open and artless and happy, and the warmth in his belly rises up to fill his chest, and he smiles back.

“Now I want to know all the tricks you have in your box,” he tells her, and she laughs like the tinkling of bells, and slowly gets her arms up under her, gently pulling the slim dildo free of his ass. His belly and cock are sticky with his come. “I haven’t come hands free since I stopped having wet dreams,” he tells her, and half-tells Alec, who is standing beside the bed and watching them both, his expression open with amazement.

“That may have been the hottest thing I have ever seen. Eliot, man, I’m not trying to diss you here, but now I kind of want Parker to fuck me,” Alec says.

“Trust me, you _do_ want her to fuck you,” Eliot says easily, not insulted in the slightest. If it had looked half as good as it had felt, he can’t blame Alec in the slightest.

Parker straightens up, her expression going from languid to perky with interest in less than a second. “Really?” she says, her tone obviously hopeful. “You haven’t got a chance to fuck Eliot yet.” It sounds like she feels like she has to say it, rather than actually wants to say it.

“And I want to fuck Eliot. But that. Girl. I could feel you both. I want to be on the inside of that.” He glances down at the red dildo. “Though with what I’ve been getting from Eliot, you could probably pick out something bigger from your toy chest for me.”

Parker’s eyes gleam. “And the restraints?” she asks, something knowing in her voice.

Alec licks his lips. “Whatever kind you like best,” he says simply.

“Eliot, do you mind if…?” Parker asks, and Eliot laughs before she can finish the question.

“No, I don’t mind. I want to see it, too.”

Parker leans over Eliot’s chest and clicks the buttons that open the cuffs. She drags his arms down and kisses the inside of each of his wrists. Then she looks at Alec. “I’ll want to bite you,” she says, sounding uncertain for the first time. “Like I bit Eliot. I’ll want to push you to the edge until you’re desperate for it, and then bite you, taste your need.”

Alec’s expression is solemn. “I’m okay with that,” he says, though Parker and Eliot have both been careful to keep their teeth out of him during sex up to this point. “I know you do it to each other. And Eliot.” He stops and just gestures to the mess on Eliot’s belly. “Obviously I’ve been missing out.”

Parker slithers off the foot of the bed and unbuckles the harness from around her hips, her gaze fixed on the assortment of dildos in her trunk.

Alec walks into the bathroom, runs the sink, and comes out with a warm, damp washcloth for Eliot to clean up with, which Eliot does. He feels life overheated taffy, all his muscles loose and easy, and Alec actually has to give him a hand to get him off the bed. He can’t imagine standing throughout whatever it is Parker and Hardison are going to do, so he drags a squashy armchair over to the side of the bed and sinks down in it.

Parker picks a blue dildo from her assortment, this one bigger than the one she had used on Eliot, and covered in little bumps instead of ripples. Then she dips into another compartment and comes out with another set of restraints, these a little shorter, and with wider cuffs than the ones that had gone around Eliot’s wrists, which are still lying across the upper third of the bed. She turns and looks at Alec, thoughtful, and says, “This one is a little different. Do you want me to tell you, or would you rather it be a surprise.”

Alec smirks a little. “Whichever. Surprise me if it gets you off, girl.”

Parker’s eyes glitter, and she directs Alec on his back on the bed. She secures the restraints around his wrists, which Alec doesn’t seem worried about at all, and then shakes out the second set of restraints and bends over one side of the bed to attach the leather to one of the rings there. She walks around the bed and attaches the other.

“Pull your knees up further,” she directs, and when Alec does, she fastens the bigger cuff just above his knee. It leaves his knees up almost to his chest. Alec watches her attach the other knee up, and then she adjusts the straps so that they pull Alec’s knees up at the same time as they spread his legs wide open.

Alec looks like he’s spread out as a sacrifice, affixed to the bed like that, and his breathing has gone rapid and a little uneven. Eliot feels his body stir in response to the position and to Alec’s reaction to the position.

Parker fits the blue dildo into the harness and buckles it around her hips. It juts out in front of her like a silent threat, not quite as big as Eliot, but close to it. She positions herself between Alec’s bound thighs, and is just as slow and careful opening him up as she had been with Eliot, though she goes for three fingers with Alec before she’s done with him, for obvious reasons.

Eliot gets flashes from them, Parker feeling powerful and needful at once, and Hardison feeling slightly dazed, his body wanting, even the position he is bound in doing something for him that is clearly a good thing for him, but he wants to move in a way that Eliot had felt no real need for, straining against the leather of the restraints, bucking up onto Parker’s fingers as she’s opening him up, impatient for what he had felt from Parker and Eliot.

Relief swells in him when she lubes up the dildo and presses it against his hole, and his back arches up into the first slow and careful stroke she eases into him. Eliot can sense the burn that he knows Alec likes, and Parker leans into him a little more quickly than she had Eliot, clearly knowing that Alec likes the burn, too. Alec’s breath huffs out in a groan of want and anticipation, and Parker reaches down between the harness and her own body and Eliot hears a faint click.

Alec lets out a strangled shout, bucking underneath her, and she shifts back, pulling out of him, and then pushing back in. It takes Eliot an embarrassingly long several seconds to realize that Alec’s dildo is actually a vibrator, and Parker moans and rocks her hips against whatever part is designed for her pleasure for a few seconds, and there is something uncommonly gentle in her mind as she watches Alec twist and jerk and groan as he toy vibrates inside him. 

Alec’s mind is almost entirely white noise to Eliot’s link, sensation so powerful that he doesn’t seem to be able to process it, but when Parker draws back out of him and plunges in deep, Alec screams out a sound of agonized pleasure, and the feel of him settles into something frantic and needy, and Eliot can see why Parker had restrained Alec’s legs, because even with them drawn up and out the way they are, he is straining up against her, desperate for more, all the muscles in his long body taut with pleasure. The sounds that he is making sound like bliss twisted around with agony, and his mind is whirling with sensation.

It is hard and fast, Parker coming twice within three minutes, all her attention focused on Alec, and in spite of the way she is taking him, all long, rough strokes and snapping hips, her mind is gentle, soothing, as though she’d known all along that this was what Alec would need, and she’s absorbing it, hot and frantic, and turning it in her mind into something else. Eliot feels the bonds between them tighten, as they had when Parker had fucked him, and he sees that tears are streaming down Alec’s face and disappearing into his hairline. Parker comes again, a little cry jerking from her lips at the sensation, and then she is bending over Alec and burying her fangs into his shoulder. Alec screams and goes still, and Eliot feels that hot rush flood between them as Parker fucks him and swallows his blood, and then Alec shudders all over and cries out hoarsely, hips bucking, and Parker pulls back and licks the wounds in his shoulder closed. She reaches behind the harness quickly and switches off the vibrator mode, and Alec shudders again and goes limp, eyes closed, face a perfect sculpture of peace.

Neither of them move for at least two full minutes. Alec, his voice a raspy croak, says, “Damn, Parker,” in a dreamy voice, and Parker lets out a peal of bright laughter, and slowly begins to pull free of his body. Before she even bothers with the strap on, she unbuckles the cuffs from above his knees, and Alec’s legs slide slowly down the bed, whole body loose and easy, just like Eliot had been. Then she strips off the straps of the harness around her hips, and sets the blue dildo on the dresser with the red one, and goes back to Alec to free his hands.

Eliot is half hard again, and hungry for them, but isn’t sure either of them are up to anything more than what they’ve already had. He honestly isn’t even sure if _he_ is up for any more. This may be just his body’s response to watching the two of them together like that while being able to feel little glimpses of it through their links.

Parker shoves the restraints off the bed without untying them from the bed frame, climbs in on one side of Alec, and gestures imperiously at Eliot. Eliot gets up and climbs into bed on Alec’s other side, and the three of the fit themselves together as a matter of course now, from weeks of practice. Alec isn’t always in the middle, but for the most part he is. Both Eliot and Parker have instantaneous wake-up reflexes, and if one of them needs to get out of bed urgently, rolling over Alec to get to the floor would be time consuming.

Plus, Alec likes sleeping in between the two of them. He’s never said it, but Eliot can sense his contentment.

In the hazy moments before Eliot drifts off to sleep, he wonders how they’re going to balance the Leverage team with this new, smaller team of vampire hunters, how they’re still going to manage both jobs, but it’s a distant concern, one that doesn’t feel like it needs urgent attention, so he lets sleep drag over him.


	18. Chapter 18

The team scores a short, sweet job that nets them almost a quarter of a million each, one of the easiest scores and smoothest cons they’ve ever run. It lasts just over three days, and Alec and Parker get to use their FBI ID’s, which makes them happy. Eliot mostly lurks in the background for the first day while Alec makes him up some new papers and an ironclad reputation, and gets hired on as muscle working for the bad guy. He’s in a position to oversee and overhear more than he usually is, and gets the satisfaction of passing along information to Alec that makes the job go more quickly, and still gives him plenty of time to concentrate on sealing the stakes so blood doesn’t seep into the wood every time they use one. Nate takes care of getting the right information into the right hands, and then there is a lull in cases that Nate fills with nights at the Brewpub and Sophie fills with auditions, and Eliot will never understand how her grifting can be so smooth and her acting can be so bad.

Munez calls to tell Spencer his equipment is ready, and Spencer lets himself be assigned a case number and a code name, though before he ever logs onto the secure website Munez provides, he has Alec check it over exhaustively.

“They’ve got at least one very capable tech handler on this,” Alec tells Eliot, sounding approving. “It’s all double encrypted and completely anonymous except for your code name, and even then, you have to have a file number to get a code name, and that file number can only be assigned by someone who is already a member, and whom everybody involved presumably already trusts. It even makes sense that it’s your weapon supplier. With the kinds of weapons you want made, there can only be a handful in the country who won’t think you’re asking for something… memorable, let’s say. We should all be glad you knew one of them.” Alec’s fingers clack away at the keyboard. “The archive is designed to die a messy death in seconds if it’s ever hacked, and the firewalls are top of the line. The whole thing has to be set up on private servers and hosted somewhere, probably by someone who either does this for a living, or more likely, by someone who knows about the vampires and isn’t hunter material, so provides technical support and financial support instead. I could find out who,” Alec says, frowning, “but there are a couple of reasons not to try.”

“Oh?” Eliot asks.

“I’m good, but there’s always a chance that whoever this guy is is better,” Alec says matter of factly. “And second, we don’t want to know the details of who everyone else is. The way the system is coded, no one can get details on anyone else, and so there’s no danger of accidentally or on purpose endangering anyone’s cover. Hacking into a system like this and getting caught would also render the system completely useless for us and for everyone else that uses it. It’s coded to self destruct if it detects any kind of tampering, and I think we all agree that we need these resources.”

“If you think it’s safe to use it the way it’s set up now, I trust your judgement,” Eliot says simply. “The swords will be here tomorrow. Why don’t you get online with my file number and code name and see if you can find someone who knows how to make ammo that hurts vampires.”

Alec grins and cracks his knuckles. After entering his case file in the requisite box, a security screen comes up, and Alec glances at the paper Eliot had jotted his code name down on.

“Usuario?” Alec asks. “Is that Spanish?”

“It means Reaper,” he says. “It’s military code for the person you send in to do the wetwork. Eliot shrugs one shoulder. “It was one of my code names when I was underground,” Eliot says. “Not my standard code name, but one used on one particular kind of mission and then never used again. They can’t connect it to me because in the kind of business I was in, there was almost always a ‘Reaper’ and it wasn’t always the same guy.”

Alec gives him a sideways glance, brief but serious, but doesn’t pursue the question any further. “And I’m in. There’s a chat pane and a list of archive subjects. Any special thing we should start on first?”

Eliot leans over his shoulder and scans the list of archive subjects. They all seem useful. “Just start at the beginning,” Eliot says finally. “I can see ways in which all of these could be helpful, not just in the field, but there’s also stuff in here about major clan families and vampire pecking order and something called nests, which seem to be different from clan families. Check out ordinance before you finish up, but it doesn’t have to be the first thing you do. Chances are, I’ll have to go over it with you to identify what some of the stuff is and what it’s used for.”

“There are a half a dozen people logged in,” Alec says. “Should I try to start up a conversation?”

“No, let them come to you if they want to chat. Right now we just want to know what they’ve got in their archives so we can incorporate anything useful into what we should be doing.” Eliot flips a hand. “Otherwise, just do it how it feels natural in order or importance.”

Alec takes a drink of his disgusting orange soda, caps it, stretches his fingers wide, and then begins to scroll through the archives.

Eliot is actually impatient for information and tired of sealing stakes, so when Parker dresses out for parkour, he joins her, wearing loose shorts, rock climbing shoes, and a tank top. Parker looks a little surprised, but doesn’t object. “We should all be doing this,” Eliot tells her. “Being able to run up, jump over and dodge around obstacles is one of skill sets we should all develop.”

Parker shrugs, with a little smirk. “I’m interested in seeing if you can keep up,” is all she says, and they go, leaving Alec alone with the computer detail.

Eliot can’t keep up, not quite; he’s as fast as she is, but she’s more flexible and is carrying around a lot less mass than he is, but he stays close, studying the way she moves and doing his best to emulate it when he can, and finding his own path when he can’t. Part of the way through, the Ranger training he’d had kicks in, and it get’s easier, eyes scanning out ahead to look for possible routes at the same time that he’s completely aware of where he’s putting his feet at any given moment. It’s meant to be training, and life-saving training at that, but by the time they circle around to the roof of Eliot’s building and tumble through the door into the apartment, they’re both flushed and laughing.

Alec is still buried in his research, so they take turns in the shower, and Eliot makes homestyle enchiladas for dinner while Parker leans over Alec’s shoulder to see what he’s reading.

While they eat, they talk about what Alec had gleaned from the website, which includes ordinance, but revolves mostly around the Vampire Council, which is apparently the entity that governs the vampires in the U.S. They assign territories, authorize the number of vampires that can be active in any one territory, and uphold vampire law, though the information on what constitutes vampire law in sketchy at best in the archive. They are also responsible for tracking down and eliminating Daywalkers, or assigning specific vampires to do so in more remote areas.

The file on Daywalkers is informative, but not huge, since they seem to be entirely solo operatives, and thus don’t have anything solid about the kind of power sharing Eliot, Alec, and Parker can do. There is some information in the archive that’s fairly important to know, however, such as the fact that a severely injured Daywalker can heal in record time if he or she has access to vampire blood, which is good to know. It may not be as important for them, since they are all marked and linked together, which, if it works the way it does for vampires, they can heal each other with their own blood, but they haven’t had a need to try that out yet, so having the ability to heal with vampire blood is potentially vital information. Well documented in the archive are the heightened senses, the speed, and the strength they all possess, as well as a half a dozen different ways to track the feel of a vampire, including the ability to follow a blood trail by scent, and that vampires have a particular scent, no two precisely the same, but easily identifiable as vampire scent nonetheless.

Eliot can’t remember if the vampires they three of them had taken out had a particular scent that translated to vampire in his brain, but there had been a lot of blood and adrenaline involved in both encounters, and it’s something he sets in the forefront of his mind to check into as soon as they get the chance.

Alec, who apparently has a good nose on him, says, “The first one smelled like crushed pine needles and pepper, and Cody smelled like an attic smell, antique furniture polish and dust and mouse turds.”

Parker looks at him sharply. “And you didn’t mention it to us?” she asks.

Alec looks a little surprised. “I thought you both smelled it, too. The first vampire’s scent was fainter, but our boy Cody reeked.”

“I didn’t notice it,” Eliot admits, and Parker nods her agreement. “That’s something we’re both going to have to work on.”

“So I have an idea,” Parker says. They both look at her and she twitches her lips into a little smile. “Our swords will be here tomorrow, which means major practice time with those, so this is basically our last night off before we start doing that. I think we should go dancing.”

Eliot blinks in surprise. “You like to go dancing?” he asks, feeling like it’s something he should have known about her, but since he didn’t seems wildly out of character. “You don’t like strangers touching you.”

Parker’s grin flickers uncertainly for a moment, but then she shrugs. “Dancing is different. Plus clubs are great places to pick pockets. But tonight I just want to dance.”

Alec grins. “Sounds like fun.” He looks at Eliot’s slight frown. “Do you not like dancing?” he asks.

“I probably don’t like dancing the same way the two of you do,” he says. “I can dance, but I’m more inclined toward country and western style dancing than anything more… complicated.”

Parker and Alec exchange a look. “If you can fight, you can dance, Eliot,” Alec says. “To a beat I mean, not the Texas two step, or whatever it is you usually do.”

“I’m not saying I can’t,” Eliot says a little sharply. “I just haven’t had a lot of practice at club style dancing in a while.”

“An even better reason to do it,” Parker says, looking delighted. “You have to let me dress you both, and no vetos. You wear what I want you to wear.”

Alec looks dubious, but shrugs. “Then we should get to pick out your clothes, too,” Alec says.

“Deal,” she says, and claps her hands excitedly.

Eliot is still struggling with the part where Parker wants to do something as normal as going dancing, so he doesn’t actively object, thinking about that little flicker on her face, like wanting to go dancing is something she felt like she had to somehow justify.

They end up standing in front of Eliot’s walk in closet, which had been less than a quarter full before Parker and Alec’s stuff had all moved in. Now it’s almost all the way full, and has boxes Eliot can’t identify stacked along the back wall. He makes a mental note to check and see if there’s anything illegal in them.

Eliot is a little relieved when Parker hands him a pair of jeans, old and worn in all the right places from years of use, and then an almost sheer black t-shirt, which fits tight across his chest, and is soft and sleek from many washings. She rifles through the bottom of his closet and tugs out a pair of cowboy boots that are comfortable and well broken in, and adds a black leather belt with a double set of grommets running the length of it. He doesn’t remember owning this belt, and it might have been the one thing he would have objected to, but considering how easy the rest of it will be to wear, he decides to take it and just be grateful.

Alec she dresses in leather pants that fit him like a second skin, and a plain white t-shirt that isn’t as sheer as Eliot’s, but is light enough that Eliot can see the outline of his nipples through the fabric. He checks on his own nipples. Visible. Damn. For shoes she pulls out a pair of short black boots cut with cuban heels, making Hardison’s tall frame even taller, and Alec’s belt is identical to Eliot’s own.

“You own leather pants?” Eliot asks.

“I have… well, I _had_ a social life,” Alec says defensively. “Though I have no idea where these shoes came from.”

“I stole them for you about a month ago,” Parker says casually. “I was pretty sure they’d work with the pants.” She smirks up at him. “Sophie has managed to cram some sense of style into my head.”

She jumps to her feet in a little, excited skipping motion. “Okay, now do me,” she says, with no apparent worry in her voice. “All my stuff is on the left side of the closet.”

Eliot and Alec cram themselves into the crowded closet and begin sorting through clothes. Some of them are clearly courtesy of Sophie, and they don’t bother with most of them. A few are business outfits, sleek and trim, and Eliot knows for a fact that they look stunning on her, but they’re not meant for going out dancing. Then, at the far end of the closet, they discover Parker’s tiny stash of girly clothes. There are a half dozen outfits, all of them dancing appropriate, but what catches Eliot’s eye is a flippy, glittering little gauzy skirt with a top that is attached to it with straps across the back, leaving the entire front open. “This one,” he says, and shows it to Alec, who only looks at it for a few seconds before nodding his agreement. It’s perfect, the dark gold fabric setting off her blond hair and the open front exposing her toned belly, and Alec gets down on the floor and finds pair of low heeled sandals that sparkle the same golden shade and were likely bought with this outfit in mind.

Parker is grinning at them, and already naked, which is a surprise. She shimmies into the tiny dress with the flirty skirt, tugging the straps into place to keep herself decently covered, though she still doesn’t bother with a bra, or even panties, apparently, since she steps into the shoes without bothering to slide any underwear on beneath the skirt.

“Okay, makeup,” she says, and gestures to Eliot, who follows her into the bathroom kind of automatically, not sure why he’s needed for the applications of makeup, not sure why Parker feels like _she_ needs makeup, which she usually doesn’t bother with, but thinking that maybe it has to do with getting dressed up and going out. Parker brushes a sparkling dash of bronzer across her face, quickly applies eyeshadow, eyeliner, and mascara, which bring out her eyes amazingly, and then smears on copper colored lipstick, which Eliot thinks somehow shouldn’t work, but with the gold of the dress, it actually does.

“Come here, Eliot,” she says, and Eliot takes a wary step back. She huffs out a little breath and says, “Will you trust me?” It’s a question she asks so infrequently that he almost instantly steps back into the room. “Look up,” she says, and Eliot sees the eyeliner in her hand moving toward his eye. “I have excellent hand-eye coordination,” she assures him, and a few moments later, Eliot finds himself staring into the mirror and trying to decide how he feels about wearing eyeliner. He feels his face heat a little, but then catches sight of both Alec and Parker standing behind him in the mirror, directing smoldering looks in his direction. He decides to let it go in the face of their obvious approval. He’s not sure how he feels about it. It makes his eyes look smokey and a little… he isn’t sure. “I have always wanted to see you in eyeliner,” Parker says, smiling at him in the mirror, her cheeks a little pink. “There was just never a good way to ask.”

“It looks good on you, man,” Alec says. “Makes your eyes look dangerous. Well, they always look dangerous, but more dangerous than usual, I mean.”

Eliot slides his knives into his boots, but Alec’s outfit leaves little in the way of room for weapons, and Parker’s leaves none at all.

“We look great,” Parker says with enthusiasm. The little golden dress clings to her in all the right places and flares in all the other places, and Eliot has never seen her look so sexy deliberately. She’s sexy all the time, but in a careless way that she doesn’t seem to even notice, but this is deliberate and devastating.

Eliot thinks that if they meet a vampire while they’re out tonight, they’re going to be woefully under armored and under armed, but doesn’t mention it out loud, and lets it go as they leave the apartment. The chances of a random vampire seem pretty slim, and besides that, Parker wants to go dancing. There had been that little vulnerable twitch of her face at Eliot’s one and only very mild question at the idea, and he’s not going to be the kind of asshole that tries to dissect whatever it is she wants to get out of this.

And besides, she is stunning, they are both stunning, and Eliot is willing to do things for them that he wouldn’t normally do himself.

Parker apparently hasn’t gone dancing in quite some time, so it’s Alec that picks the club, and Eliot grimly doesn’t ask her why she hasn’t been, and if she has fun tonight, he promises himself to make sure that she gets to go out as often as she wants. The club Alec picks is called _Hot Mess_ , and Alec admits to them that it has a mixed clientele, so not to get hot under the collar if they get hit on by a member of the same sex. Eliot and Parker just look at him, and his skin is too dark to show a real blush, but it sounds like he’s blushing when he says, “Oh, yeah, right,” and gives them both a goofy, happy kind of smile.

Eliot snorts, and they get out of the van. The line for the bar snakes out the front door and halfway around the next block, but Alec doesn’t step into the back of the line. He walks around the line of people to the guy at the door, bends and whispers something to Parker, and Parker looks thoughtful and intrigued and goes to her tiptoes to murmur something to the door guard. He looks her over, eyes appreciative but in a way that is somehow not offensive, just kind of measuring, and then he looks at Alec and Eliot almost the same way. Then he asks for I.D., though it’s patently ridiculous to I.D. Eliot, which they give over to him, and says something through the little headpiece he’s wearing before he unhooks a thick, plush red velvet rope and gestures them inside.

The door guard sticks a gold star sticker on Parker’s cheekbone, which Eliot thinks should look silly, but instead looks decorative, like it was meant to go with the outfit. Then, still holding the paper of stars, asks, “Either of you?”

“I will,” Alec says, at the same time that Eliot says, “Either of us what?” and the door guard laughs at him and sticks a gold star to Alec’s cheekbone.

“If you don’t know, it’s probably not something you want to do this time. Maybe next time though. We don’t get enough men who want to work the stages.” He glances at Parker and Eliot. “One of the staff will come by and let you know when space opens up. We ask for two songs, but we don’t insist on it.”

“Work the stages?” Eliot asks Alec as Alec herds him inside gently by the elbow. 

“Dance on the elevated stages,” Alec explains, which becomes much more clear when they enter the half-light of the club itself and Alec sees that it’s a big building, bigger than the outside had made it seem, with two stories, the upper one a broad walkway around the lower story, so that you can sit at a table up on top and look down and still see the dance floor. There are a dozen raised platforms on the dance floor, which covers the whole space on the bottom floor except for the bar itself, no tables or chairs or anything to clutter the space up, except for the platforms themselves, which are of varying heights and sizes and shapes, and are all currently filled with beautiful people moving with the heavy thrum of the beat.

Eliot is glad he didn’t volunteer to work the stages.

Parker takes their hands and drags them over to the bar, grinning, her hips already shimmying to the music a little, flipping the gauzy little skirt around her smooth, golden legs. “I took a belly dancing class once,” she tells them, shouting a little to be heard over the music and the crowd. “I was in college, and the only other class that interested me for physical education was archery, but it clashed with one of my other classes, so I took belly dancing.” She does a demonstrative little twist and wiggle.

Alec and Eliot meet gazes over her head, and Eliot mouths the word, “College,” and Alec, eyes a little wide with surprise, shakes his head, obviously having had no idea Parker had done anything as mundane as attend college, especially when they already know for a fact that she didn’t attend high school. She is like this sometimes. They know almost nothing about her past except for some of the more spectacular jobs she’s pulled, and then she’ll just mention offhand something that neither of them had known or expected of her like it means nothing at all. They have to let her do it herself though. She responds to direct questions with evasions or by ignoring them entirely. 

This time, Alec leans in and asks, “What did you study?” because her easy manner seems to lend itself to careful questions. 

“Criminal Justice and Sociology,” she says, smile widening at the surprised look on Alec’s face. “Just a two year degree, which I finished in a year and a summer semester, but it seemed like if I was going to break the law, I should have some understanding of what I was doing.” She shrugs. “I liked college. If we weren’t so busy all the time, I might like to go back and pick up a few classes.”

“You can take lots of classes online,” Alec suggests, and Parker wrinkles her nose. 

“I like being in the classroom with all the other people. I like the… atmosphere.” Eliot masks his surprise. School had apparently been something Parker had connected with socially, which considering her social skills, seems odd but somehow also… correct for her. She could interact on whatever level she felt comfortable with, and still be surrounded by people at the same time that she wasn’t actually required to interact with them.

“Maybe once things get settled down,” Eliot says, and means it. There is a little hint of wistfulness in her face, and neither Sophie nor Nate would object to Parker taking only part time work with the team if it was because she wanted to go back to college. Eliot is certain of it.

“Buy me a drink,” she says, which isn’t a surprise until Eliot and Alec realize that she isn’t talking to either of them, but rather to a nervous looking, clearly barely of age young man standing on the other side of Eliot. The guy looks at her, clearly startled and a little awed -- he actually looks around to make sure she’s talking to him -- and when she beams at him, he beckons one of the bartenders over and orders a Corona with lime for himself, and whatever the lady wants.

The lady orders a whiskey straight up, drinks it down in several long swallows, and then darts around Eliot to grab up the boy’s hand -- the kid looks like he might be about to have a heart attack, and that if he does, he’ll die happy -- and drags him behind her onto the dance floor.

Parker can _move_.

The kid is no slouch either, he keeps up with her fairly well, especially when he gets over being too nervous to touch her, and they move in close together and twist their hips to the beat, Parker’s arms in the air, tracing exotic patterns with her fingers, the kid running his fingertips down the insides of her arms lightly, and cupping her hips gingerly. Eliot and Alec watch, both mesmerized and amused. It’s just like Parker not to dance with one of them first, to pick someone who looks a little lost and uncertain, and make sure that he leaves the floor strutting, where all his friends crowd around him and clap him on the back and he looks stunned and grins widely at his good fortune.

“He looked nervous,” Parker says, “Poor baby.” She slides up to the bar between Alec and Eliot and says, “Now one of you buy the drinks,” she orders. “Sophie says that if I ever go to a bar, I should never have to buy my own drinks.”

“Sophie is a hundred percent right,” Eliot says, reaching for his wallet and collecting their drink orders. Parker dials it back to a gin and tonic and Alec orders a jagerbomb (Eliot shudders with jagerbomb related military PTSD, or something close to it). Eliot asks for and receives a menu of the microbrews they serve and orders a Dog Tag brew, having never tried it before. He’s working his way through the beers brewed in the area, a kind of part time hobby, and shrugs a shoulder indifferently when the bartender tells him they only have it in bottles, not on tap.

“You should try it on tap though,” the bartender tells him seriously. “There’s a bar called A-Game that pulls it, and it’s worth having to watch whatever sport they’ve got on their giant TV’s to get it in draft form. They’ve got a pretty good grill, too.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that sometime,” Eliot says, and pays for the drinks and tips the bartender a twenty. What the hell, he can afford he. He hardly spends any of his money anyway.

Alec slams his jagerbomb, whooshing out a harsh breath at the combo, and Eliot remembers being twenty-six with only a very little nostalgia. He nurses his craft beer because he’s almost certainly going to be the one driving them home, and Parker takes a single tiny sip of her gin and tonic, and then grabs Alec’s hand. “Dance with me?” she asks, almost a little shyly, and Alec smiles widely at her.

“Any time you want,” he tells her, and leads her out onto the dance floor. The two of them together, with the disparities in their colorations and their height difference, shouldn’t work as well as it does together, but Parker acts like she’s barely aware of how much taller Alec is, and Alec must have practiced dancing with smaller women, because he keeps his knees bent and his face almost on a level with hers. She runs her hands blatantly across his ass in his leather jeans, and Eliot sees Alec tip his head back and laugh at her audacity. The music at this club seems pretty eclectic so far, the first song having been a fast, techno song, this one slower with a rougher bassline, all of it music you can dance to, but they don’t seem to be locked into any one style of music. Alec and Parker come tumbling off the dance floor in a riot of wide smiles and graceful bodies, and Parker tips her gin and tonic back and downs it, while Alec orders himself another jagerbomb.

Eliot is just finishing the last of his Dog Tag when a young, dark-haired guy who looks more Spanish than Hispanic slides up beside him and gives him a quick, almost polite look over, and a hopeful smile. “Buy you a drink?” he asks. 

Eliot glances over his shoulder at Parker and Alec, and Parker is nodding encouragingly while Alec smirks a little. “Sure,” he says. “What do you know about Portland microbrews?”

The guy’s face brightens. “A lot, actually. I’m into trying everything brewed in this area. I’ve got a... “ He pauses, then flushes charmingly, just across the tops of his cheeks. “A spreadsheet,” he finishes, waving an embarrassed hand. 

“No, me too,” Eliot says, which is a half truth. Alec had made him a spreadsheet when Eliot had started to complain that he couldn’t remember if he’d tried a particular brew before. “I mean, I don’t maintain it because I’m not that computer literate and also a little lazy, but a friend keeps it up for me. What’s at the top of your list?”

“What do you like? Light, medium, dark, hoppy, malty?” The kid is grinning broadly, and Eliot thinks he may be about Alec’s age. “I’m all over the place in taste, I like almost everything, but I can give you a better suggestion if I know what kind of beer you like best.”

“Dark,” Eliot answers. “Something dark but not too bitter. I like some of the paler ales, too, and I try everything at least once, but the darker the better.”

“Have you ever tried Black River Coffee Stout?” the kid asks, and Eliot shakes his head, intrigued. 

“No, but I’m open to the notion,” he says, and holds out a hand. “Eliot,” he introduces himself.

The kid takes his hand. “Jairo,” he says, and then looks a little embarrassed. “My father is Castilian and my mother agreed to let him name the boys if she could name the girls. So I got stuck with Jairo and my sisters are Angelina and Carolita.”

“Jairo,” Eliot repeats, careful with the pronunciation. “Don’t knock it. Having a distinctive name is better than being one of fifty Juan’s.”

Jairo gives Eliot a little grin, that flush touching just the tops of his cheeks again, and motions to the bartender and orders their beers. “So,” Jairo asks. “Are you here alone?”

“With some friends,” Eliot says, and glances over his shoulder to see that Alec has struck up a conversation with a stunning redhead, and that Parker is nowhere to be seen. He scans the crowd for her for several long seconds, before he sees her up on one of the stages, dancing like he would not have believed that she could, although he can’t quite pinpoint why he’s surprised. She’s graceful, acrobatic, fearless. He’s pretty sure that the guys standing at the foot of the stage are getting flashes of the fact that she’s not wearing any underwear, but the crowd around her is howling their approval at the sway of her hips and the arch of her back and the shift and press of her body in time with the music. “That one up there, and this guy.” He hooks his thumb over his shoulder to indicate Alec. “We’ve got a big job coming up, so we thought we’d take the night to do with as we pleased.”

Their beers arrive and they twist off the tops. Eliot takes a brief sip and holds his on his tongue for a long moment, and then a longer swallow. The coffee notes are undeniably present, and the brew is dark and full bodied.

“Yes?” Jairo asks, looking anxious, and Eliot grins.

“Yes. This one definitely goes on the spreadsheet.” Jairo looks delighted. They drink their beers and alternately chat and watch Parker dancing. Alec turns a brief glance on Eliot, his gaze flickering to Jairo, and makes a little pushing gesture that Eliot has no idea the meaning behind. He reaches out for Alec’s mind kind of automatically, and receives a brief image of himself and Jairo on the dance floor.

Just as he’s thinking about whether or not he wants to do that, Jairo asks, “So, do you dance?”

Eliot considers his answer carefully. “I can dance, but I do better with something with steps and rhythm than I do with club music. I’m not telling you no, I’m just telling you it might be awkward until I get my feet under me. It’s been a long time since I went dancing.”

“What kind of steps are we talking?” Jairo asks. He looks genuinely interested. “I know the jockey. I can put in a request.”

Eliot considers. “I can ballroom dance, two-step, swing, and dance anything with a latin beat,” he says. Jairo’s face opens up into a smile.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he says, and slides away from the bar and through the crowd on the dance floor where the DJ has his gear set up.

Eliot ponders whether he’s actually going to dance with this kid, and is surprised to realize that he thinks he is. He is equally surprised that Jairo smells a little like Parker, of exotic spices, though not as intensely as she does, and he wonders what his blood tastes like. 

He glances back at Alec, who holds a finger up to his companion and slides up closer to Eliot. “You gonna get your dance on?” Alec asks, leaning in close so that his breath brushes against Eliot’s ear. “Because that kid is simultaneously cute as a button and sex on a stick.”

Eliot snorts out a laugh. “Depending on the music,” he hedges. Then adds, leaning up to murmur into Alec’s ear, “I want a taste of him.”

Alec draws back, looking a little surprised, and then his eyes glitter a little with a smolder that looks good on him. “Just don’t get caught,” Alec says.

“I’ve never been caught,” Eliot says seriously. “If it can’t be done without risk, I’ll live without it.”

One of the wait staff shimmies up to Alec, half dancing even while holding a tray full of empties, and half-shouts, “The stage in the northwest corner is about to open up, if you’re up for it.”

Alec grins and nods, tips Eliot a two fingered salute, and turns to follow the waitress toward one of the raised platforms.

Jairo returns a minute later, laughing a little and out of breath, and says, “I had to bribe him with stage time,” he says, gesturing toward the little gold star on his cheek. “It’s not that I mind the stages, but I’d rather be in the crowd.”

“What should I be expecting?” Eliot asks, giving the kid one of his good smiles, the kind that he saves for when he means to impress.

“Mambo with a swing rhythm,” Jairo says, blinking a little dazedly at Eliot’s smile and then flushing again, so delicate, the color just touching the tops of his cheeks. He wraps a hand around his bottle and drinks down several long swallows, and Eliot watches the movement of his throat while he does it, and feels the slight twitch that means his fangs are about to drop, and presses it back. Alec had been right. Cute as a button and sex on a stick. He’s wearing dark jeans and a ribbed Henley buttoned down all the way.

“You should lose the shirt,” Eliot hears himself say with real surprise. “You’ll be too hot in it. And I’m taller than you, so I’ll lead.”

“I’ll lose mine if you’ll lose yours,” Jairo says, flushing faintly again, and Eliot grins a little and nods his agreement. “Will there even be room on the floor for this kind of action?” he asks. The floor is pretty crowded, not crammed full, but not a lot of room to maneuver.

“I took care of it,” Jairo says, sipping at his beer. “My uncle owns this club,” he confesses.

Eliot laughs. “Must be nice to get perks with the staff.”

“I don’t usually take advantage,” Jairo says. “But you…” he lets the sentence trail off, flushes again, and takes a drink of his beer. 

The song currently playing ends with a low bumping flourish, and the DJ’s voice from up front comes out over the speakers. “Okay, folks, make some room in the middle, I’ve got a special request that I personally want to see happen.” The crowd doesn’t grumble, just murmurs and sounds curious.

Jairo says, “Ready?” and strips off his shirt and tosses it on the bar. Eliot strips off his own shirt and the bartender takes both shirts and tucks them under the bar. 

“He’s really good, by the way,” the bartender says, sounding like he half-envies and half-pities Eliot. “Try to keep up.”

“I won’t work you over too hard,” Jairo murmurs as he leans close to Eliot as they make their way to the center of the dance floor. There’s a large open oval of space, all the dancers pressing out toward the walls, but staying put to see what’s going on.

“I’m not worried,” Eliot says, and isn’t. He’d spent a lot of time in Latin America, and he’s more sure of his ability to Salsa or Mambo and the like than he is his ability not to make a fool of himself dancing to club music. “Flips?” Eliot asks.

Jairo purses his lips. “If you’re sure you can handle my weight.”

“I’m sure,” Eliot says.

The dancers on the stages have gone still, and Eliot is aware of both Parker and Alec watching him about to do this, but the scent of Jairo’s blood is heady and the couple of beers he’d had in quick succession have left him feeling loose and easy.

The DJ queues up a Mambo that stays classic for about six beats, during which Jairo and Eliot cue up and swing in close, and then the swing beat Jairo had mentioned kicks in, and it’s a fusion of music that Eliot falls into easily, Jairo light and lithe in his arms, following Eliot’s lead easily, first their bodies close and rocking together, then Eliot swinging Jairo out and away and the back and up into an over the shoulder flip, Jairo landing perfectly balanced and turning back into Eliot’s lead like they aren’t making up half of what they’re doing on the fly. Jairo grinds against Eliot, chest sweaty and slick against Eliot’s, and then throws himself backward into a flip over Eliot’s outstretched arm, again landing like a cat. At the closing beat, Eliot slides his thighs between Jairo’s thighs and they end up like that, pressed together from chest to thighs. Jairo is breathing hard and the crowd is cheering, and Eliot is thinking about a way to cut Jairo out of the crowd and take him someplace private where he will get the chance to sink his fangs into Jairo and probably leave him there thinking that they’d made out with heavy petting, or might have actually had sex, and Eliot isn’t really worried about which one Jairo chooses to think.

Then he wants to dance with Alec and with Parker, and then he wants to go home and fuck one or both of them until his stamina fails him.

He leads Jairo back to the bar, where the bartender hands them back their shirts and replaces their beers. “I can’t believe that just happened,” Jairo says, his voice taut and excited and trembling a little. “Totally worth the stage time.”

“I’m fairly interested in seeing you on the stage,” Eliot says truthfully, and Jairo grins and flushes at the same time. 

“Don’t take this the wrong way, because you are obviously ripped, but I’ve never had anyone flip me like that before without worrying about a bad landing or a concussion. You’re stronger than you look.”

“I don’t bulk up much,” Eliot says, shrugging into his shirt. “Mostly I endurance train for my job.”

Jairo takes a long drink of his beer, still panting a little from the dancing. Then, almost shyly, he asks, “Do you want to go upstairs and find a table?”

“Is there anything more private?” Eliot asks, deciding to go with bold, and Jairo’s lips quirk.

“I have access to the offices in back,” he says, and cocks his head a little. “I won’t put out on the basis of one dance, even one really good dance, but I wouldn’t mind spending a little private time with you.”

“No pressure,” Eliot says carefully.

Jairo nods, and then jerks his head toward the end of the bar. “This way,” he says, and Eliot follows him through the crowd and through a door marked “Employees Only,” and then through the first door on the right that they come too, a fairly classy office space with a desk and some file cabinets, dim lighting, and a low leather couch. Eliot puts his hands on Jairo’s hips and guides him backward toward the couch.

“Any specific rules I should know about here?” he asks.

“No hands below the belt,” Jairo says firmly, watching Eliot’s face and seeming satisfied with what he sees there. Jairo sinks onto the couch, first just sitting, and then turning so that he is lounging full length across it, and Eliot eases down on top of him, feeling the pressure of Jairo’s erection against his own. He rocks his hips, and Jairo sighs and leans up a little, like he wants Eliot to kiss him, but Eliot isn’t interested in kissing anyone that isn’t Parker or Alec, though he isn’t inhuman, and the kid’s hard on pressing against his own feels really damned good. Eliot slides a hand into Jairo’s loose black curls and tugs his face to the side, feeling his fangs drop, and then, still rolling his hips at a leisurely pace, bites down as gently as he can. Jairo makes a little sound, like the gasp of a mouse that’s just been pounced on by a cat, and then his blood is filling Eliot’s mouth, and he tastes like fresh grass and clover honey. Jairo moans, his hands going up to twist into Eliot’s hair, and arches his neck as though to give Eliot a better angle, which Eliot takes advantage of. 

He doesn’t take much, just enough to feel the rush of the kid’s fresh, sweetish blood sate the need he’d felt when he’d smelled the kid at the bar, and he licks the wounds closed gently, and then sucks lightly on his neck, leaving the faintest of marks.

Jairo blinks up at him dazedly, looking post-coital and smiling faintly. “I hope you come back,” he says. “I want to dance with you again.”

Eliot levers himself of Jairo and helps the kid sit up. He leans heavily against Eliot’s shoulder for a long moment, and then visibly gathers himself together. “Probably will,” Eliot says truthfully. “I like the company.”

Jairo flushes again, and when he stands he shifts uncomfortably to situate his erection, then he leads Eliot out of the office and back into the bar proper. One of the waitstaff immediately accosts him and directs him to one of the stages, and Jairo gives Eliot an intent little smile, and lets himself be led away.

Parker and Alec are at the bar, exchanging whispers and drinking what look like tequila sunrises to Eliot, when he joins him.

“And you said you couldn’t dance,” Alec says, grinning and punching Eliot on the arm. 

“No, I said I’m a little rusty at club dancing. That was something else.”

Parker leans in close and sniffs at Eliot. “Well, you weren’t gone long enough for sex, so I guess you just tasted him?”

“I don’t fuck around on my partners,” Eliot says automatically and without any hesitation. 

“Told you,” Alec says. “What was it about him? You don’t usually do it this way. It’s usually just someone you just beat up.”

“The way he smelled,” Eliot says. “And his blood tasted like fresh grass and clover honey.”

Parker makes a little hmming sound, thoughtful. “I wonder if some people are more likely to draw vampires than others just because of the way they smell. People who have especially tasty blood.”

“I’ll check and see if there’s anything on it in the archive,” Alec says. “In the meantime, why don’t you dance with one of us. We don’t expect to be flipped or anything, and we’re both good enough to make you look like you know what you’re doing until you feel more comfortable doing it.” Alec’s voice is easy and light, but also a little demanding, like he has no intention of leaving this club until Eliot has danced with them at least once.

They actually dance several times, sometimes just two of them, sometimes all three of them together, and they prove themselves right about Eliot’s ability to dance to club music. Once he stops thinking about where to put his hands and his feet, they seem to know what to do naturally, and Parker and Alec both get tipsy enough to be giggly and handsy, while Eliot nurses a couple more beers so he can be sober enough to get them home.

Sometime later, when he realizes he’s on the verge of sliding Parker’s skirt up around her hips and flashing her lack of underwear to the whole room, he cajoles them out of the bar and back onto the street, where they walk back around the block to the van.

Eliot climbs in behind the wheel, and Alec and Parker climb in the back, and after several suspicious sounding moans and gasps, angles the rearview mirror so that he can watch Parker slowly and methodically ride Alec, who has his hands on her hips and his head thrown back against the seat, eyes closed. Amused, Eliot turns his attention back toward the road and gets them all home safely.

Alec and Parker are less than helpful as they stagger their way through the side door and into the apartment, one of them hanging off of either side of Eliot.

“You two are so going to regret this in the morning when we start training with the real swords,” he murmurs fondly as he forces them both to drink a glass of water and take a couple of ibuprofen.


	19. Chapter 19

Eliot can take them through the training on the shorter blades easily enough. They all end up with knicks and shallow gashes over the course of a few days, but they experiment with blood healing one another until they get comfortable with it, even though the injuries are really only minor nuisances.

They hang up on the long blades, and it takes Eliot two weeks to finally admit that he’s going to have to get someone to teach him what he’s doing, grumpily, because he has rarely ever put his hands on a weapon that he hasn’t got a good feel for relatively quickly. They talk about finding someone and training all three of them together, but in the end, the only way to find a trainer to teach them what they need to know to kill vampires is to find someone from the Daywalker community. Trying to explain to even the most open minded of swordsmanship instructors that what you really want to learn is how to behead someone seems like a good way to draw attention to yourself in a way that might lead to things like interviews with the police.

Alec, who is busy on the computer any time he isn’t busy sparring, calls Eliot out of the kitchen one day and stands up and gestures to the desk chair in front of his laptop. “I’ve got a code name and a file number, but you and I don’t talk the same, Eliot, we use totally different verbiage, and if these guys catch on to the fact that the guy they’ve been talking to isn’t the guy that they’re actually training, they’re likely going to try to kill you. So you have to handle the chat.”

Eliot sinks down into the chair and sees an open chat box. There’s a file number and the code name Ronan attached to it, and the opening line is, _I hear you’re looking for an instructor for long blades._

Eliot sighs, and cracks his knuckles, and types in, _I’ve got close quarters combat experience and can handle long knives or very short swords, but I’ve never needed to know how to use an actual sword before._

There is a pause, and then Ronan texts back, _You’re new. I would have remembered your code name._

Eliot simply types back, _Yes._

_What happened?_ Ronan texts.

_I interrupted what I thought was a mugging,_ Eliot half lies. _Since then, things have been different._

_Former military?_ Ronan texts.

_Yes._ Eliot types.

_This isn’t something you should get involved with if you’re not willing to do whatever it takes,_ Ronan texts.

_I have a hundred silver molded stakes, a shortsword, and custom made leather fighting gear,_ Eliot types. _I just spent a ridiculous amount of money on steel edged, silver plated blades. I’m willing to do whatever it takes, including trying to find out who to go to for long sword lessons from a complete stranger on a site I got from a weapons dealer._

_I can give you a name, but keep my name out of it. Including my code name. He knows what he’s teaching you to do, but he doesn’t want to know the details._ Ronan texts.

_Understood,_ Eliot types. _Contact information?_

Ronan types out the name of a dojo in Cambridge, and Eliot thanks him and signs off. 

To Hardison, he says, “They must have a way of knowing the general location the system we’re dialing in from or he would have had to have asked me where I was and how far I could travel. See if you can make that go away without totally pulling down the site.”

“I’m on it,” Alec says, settling back into his seat.


	20. Chapter 20

Eliot contacts the dojo and sets up lessons with a sensei that doesn’t ask for his name and doesn’t offer one in return. He is brooding over the fact that he doesn’t like even the general area of his location being known when Parker comes into the kitchen with her phone in her hand, frowning slightly. 

Eliot glances a question at her, and she says, “Nate called. He wanted to warn us that he’s dropping off the grid for a little while to do some background work on a job, but he didn’t want to tell me what the job was. I think he called me instead of you or Alec because he didn’t want to give details and decided I was the least likely one of us to ask.” There is a vertical furrow between her brows. “So I called Sophie, and she says she knows the details, but it’s a small job that might turn into something bigger, and Nate wants to find out more about it before he tries to put a con together.”

“Are you worried?” Eliot asks, feeling himself frowning a little as well.

“Not exactly. They know how to get in touch with us. I’m actually feeling… guilty, I think?” She looks a question at him, like he should be able to tell her if that’s actually what she’s feeling. “Because of what we’re doing right now. Not having to worry about any jobs… interrupting this stuff makes me feel… relieved?”

Eliot relaxes a little. “Nothing to feel guilty for. If they need us, we’ll be there just like always, and what we’re doing now is important, too. Having some time to settle into it without having to worry about running cons for a little while just makes things easier.” He tips her chin up. “And Nate has done this before, Parker. He does it fairly frequently. When jobs don’t just show up on our doorstep, he goes hunting for them, and this is how he does it.”

Parker’s frown fades. “I didn’t know that,” she says. “I thought all the cons were just sort of dropped in our laps.”

“A lot of them are, but when nothing drops, Nate goes fishing. Usually for something big. As long as Sophie knows what he’s doing and can get in contact with him, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I didn’t used to have to deal with all these… feelings,” she says. “They’re confusing, but since the link marks… things feel different. It’s like you and Alec are feeling things all the time, and I can kind of feel them, too, and I don’t know what to do with all of them.”

Eliot tries to decide how to respond to that in a way that will make sense to Parker, but can only come up with, “You’ve always had feelings. Just different ones, or ones that you processed differently. Now if you have feelings because of something Alec or I am feeling, you can just ask us. We’ll help you sort it out.”

Her chin firms up and she gives a brief nod. “I need a break from combat training. I’m going to go be a thief for today.”

“Whatever you need,” Eliot says, trying not to let the tenderness he’s feeling for her seep through the link and confuse her. She gives him a brief, soft kind of look, and then stands up and disappears into the bedroom. Eliot decides to leave her to it.


	21. Chapter 21

Once he’s got a swordmaster at hand, Eliot is relieved to find out that his facility with weapons extends to long blades with some changes in stance and balance and practice with an opponent that knows what he’s doing. That had been the main problem with practicing with Alec and Parker. None of them had had any idea about the differences in handling a long blade versus a short blade. Eliot doesn’t have to tell the swordmaster what he wants to use the blade for. Either someone had told him already, or teaching someone to disable and behead a vampire with a long sword is what he does all the time.

Eliot, whose training had all come from the military and from being hired muscle, is unprepared for the slow and easy pace the man sets, is unused to being praised for doing things right, and is generally a little uneasy under the man’s tutelage. He’s an old man, not elderly, but somewhere in his sixties at least, and he exudes a sense of calm and patience that Eliot simply doesn’t know how to compare to the rest of his combat training. 

Nevertheless, within a month he feels comfortable with a long sword in his hand, although he’s aware that it takes a lot longer for a normal human to master any kind of weapon. He’s not a normal human though, and the swordmaster doesn’t make any comments regarding Eliot’s speedy progress through his lessons. It will still be a long time before Eliot is as good with a long blade as he is with his bare hands or a shorter blade, but he’s getting the feel for it well enough to start Parker and Alec on the basics within the first four weeks.

They hear from Sophie twice, just checking in so that they know things are fine with Nate, but a month between jobs is a long time, and Eliot is starting to have some concerns about Nate being out of touch. He keeps his concerns to himself, concentrates on both learning to use a long blade and teaching Alec and Parker as he learns, and then there are a handful of nighttime excursions.

Alec keeps on top of the solitary vampires in the city with a tenacity that is almost magical, and over the course of six weeks, the three of them remove eight of them from play permanently. The solitary ones seem to be the ones that are the most likely to kill when they feed, although they do come across a couple that are far more careful, leaving slightly pale victims behind, but not draining their victims dry. They leave those two alone for now, ultimately deciding that if they aren’t leaving corpses behind them, they may still be dangerous, but they are not an immediate threat. Alec keeps tabs on them, but they don’t go out and stake the vampires that aren’t killing people to live when they have all three done the same thing, albeit taking a lesser amount of blood when feeding.

During the course of events, both Parker and Eliot get a taste of vampire blood, and are both glad and disappointed that it doesn’t seem to do anything to them that they couldn’t do before. If there had been another level of physical strength, speed, or heightened senses, that would have been great, but it seems like the link marks do for them what drinking vampire blood does for a normal Daywalker, and they don’t need the extra boost in power to become proficient at dispatching vampires, at least not one at a time. When it becomes more than one against three, they will probably have a harder time of it, but for now they’re not worrying about it.


	22. Chapter 22

Sophie calls Eliot at three p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon to tell them she’s lost track of Nate. She hasn’t heard from him in more than a week, though previously he’d been checking in every four or five days.

The put everything vampire related aside, and Alec gets to work on his computer, getting background information from Sophie, who finally is willing to give details on what Nate had been working on. According to Sophie, Nate had been off playing a rich yacht owner that isn’t opposed to doing some smuggling through international waters. His target had been a sex slavery ring run out of Portland itself, which he’d picked up rumors of through the grapevine, and none of them are that surprised. Nate considers his home territory to come with a certain amount of safety that the rest of them have had burned out of them years ago. 

He’d started out with cargo, Sophie thinks guns and ammunition, though neither of them had checked too closely into it, because they were looking to hook a bigger fish than that.

Nate had done a half dozen runs for them, Ukranian mob, according to Sophie’s intel, and the last time she’d heard from Nate, he’d been fairly well convinced that they’d approach him for their next shipment of human cargo. That had been three days ago. Sophie has details of the yachts registry and the planned itinerary, which Hardison copies down and immediately starts to try to track.

Eliot is pissed. They should have been in on this job from the first illegal shipment Nate had made, but Nate had made the call that they were too recognizable as a team, and had decided to handle the low end of the deal first, flying solo, and now he’s missing.

Sophie gives them the names of Nate’s contacts and the details of all his past shipments for them, and Hardison adds them to his list of things to dig into.

The big bad guy Nate had been hoping to take down is Rutger Hvam, and as soon as Eliot hears the name he goes quiet and intent. Parker and Hardison notice immediately, and they can feel not to press him, but Sophie doesn’t share their advantages, and when she sees his face, she goes pale and bloodless, knowing just by his expression that it’s bad.

Alec derails her asking any questions of Eliot by pulling up all the information he can get his hands on about Rutger Hvam, and it’s clear to all of them that this should have been a team con, not Nate working solo with what is likely incomplete information. Hvam is wanted by every alphabet agency in the U.S. and both MI5 and Interpol have charges pending against him based on witness testimony.

“None of this came up when we researched the sex trade ring,” Sophie says, sounding steady, but extremely tense. 

“That’s why you have a genius hacker,” Alec snaps. “So you get the whole picture before you take on a Ukranian crime lord with his fingers in multiple pies.” He sounds genuinely irate. “I know you and Nate have this thing going on, Sophie, but you should have come to us as soon as you started working for this thug. This should have been a full team mission.”

Sophie, speaking gently with only a slight tremble in her voice says, “It seemed straightforward and low risk, and we were trying to let the three of you settle into your own… thing.”

It’s the first indication they have had that Nate and Sophie were aware that they have a thing, but Eliot can sort of see it now in retrospect. Neither Nate nor Sophie are anything close to stupid, and the three of them have been essentially living together for months now.

“We appreciate the accommodation you were trying to make, but this is what happens when the whole team isn’t involved in the planning and prep stages,” Eliot says. “Things get overlooked or vital information, which I could have given you about Hvam, isn’t taken into consideration. Hvam is an animal in human skin, Sophie. I’ve gone up against him before, and I’d have to call the outcome a draw, and that was without him holding one of my team members hostage.” Eliot rakes a hand through his hair. “Okay, step one is to get Nate back from him, whatever it takes. If it tanks the rest of the job, but we get Nate back alive and whole, that’s the most important things. Step two, we throw everything we can about Hvam together as quickly as possible, as much info as we can, but focussing on where Nate might be and what he might be doing, and only then getting Hardison to put together a solid dossier on Hvam, including all his business associates and holdings, and start digging for clues. Although we actually have to do step two to get to step one. The point is, only after those two things happen do we try to do anything to take Hvam down. His businesses are strictly secondary to finding Nate and getting him away from Hvam before Hvam pings Nate’s con and kills him.”

Sophie’s hands are shaking, and Eliot gets up and puts water on for tea, fishing out one of her favorites from his supplies, and doesn’t say anything else until he can put a cup of hot tea in Sophie’s hands so she can pull herself together. “So does Hvam know you as anyone?” Eliot asks. 

“Nate’s soon to be ex-wife,” Sophie says. “To explain why he’s suddenly willing to move into the illegal transportation of goods and services. He hasn’t seen my face, though. He’s only overheard deliberately orchestrated phone calls between us.”

“Good, that’s good. Do you know where he’s getting his cargo from?” Eliot asks.

“Just a street name, Rocks, no last name. He rounds them up and sells them to the highest bidder, transportation not included, which is why they needed Nate and the yacht.”

“Rafael ‘Rocks’ Posternia,” Alec says without looking up from his keyboard. “Deals in a little bit of everything, free lance, pays a small fortune to the mob to keep them out of his business. Nasty piece of work. I’ll see if I can get into his systems and find out when he plans on moving cargo around.”

“Where does Hvam do business?” Parker asks. “Is there a place I can go to plant wires and maybe find out what we’re stepping into?”

“He has a few places, I’m not sure how you’d manage to get in and cover them all and then get back out again. Nate always met him on the yacht, which was already wired. I haven’t been able to get anything from the feed for the last two days, but that may be just because they aren’t on the boat.”

“Send me the data on the feed,” Hardison demands, and Sophie shuffles through her bag and comes out with a tablet computer, which she passes to Hardison. 

“The last time I talked to Nate, he was still docked in the harbor,” Sophie says. “GPS coordinates show that it hasn’t moved, but it would have been a simple matter to take Nate off the boat if his cover was blown.”

“Give me addresses,” Parker says, sounding grim. “Your best guesses in order of likelihood of him taking a prisoner there.”

Eliot does not point out that if Nate’s cover had been blown, he’s likely dead already. Hvam doesn’t take chances. Instead he says, “Don’t panic yet. Trafficking in human cargo is tricky business, it takes time and resources. Hvam may have just wanted to keep Nate with him until he’s ready to send out his cargo so there wouldn’t be any chance of Nate getting cold feed when he finds out he’s carrying young girls and boys rather than weapons. Some men are perfectly willing to do one, but don’t want to have anything to do with the other. If Hvam needs Nate’s boat, he may just be hanging on to Nate to make sure he doesn’t rabbit.” All of which is true, but doesn’t much help abate the hard knot of dread in Eliot’s belly.

“I’ve got the boat,” Alec says. “It’s still docked, but according to port authority records, it’s due to ship out tonight.” Alec swings around in his chair and passes out earbuds. “We stay in constant contact until we find Nate,” he says flatly. “Eliot?”

“Yeah, I’m going to the boat. Alec, you keep putting together everything you know about Hvam. Parker, you start planting bugs. If Nate is just a slightly unwilling guest until he becomes useful, you might start in places where Hvam would take someone to isolate them, but not into places where he might be hiding bodies. Get as many as you can. How much time do we have?”

“Six hours and eighteen minutes until the Gloria is scheduled to haul anchor.” Alec nods tightly. “I’ll keep everyone updated.”


	23. Chapter 23

Eliot takes the boat because he’s their measure of last resort. No matter where else Hvam has to come, if Nate isn’t dead already, they both have to end up there. The Gloria is docked in the privately owned section of the harbor, and from the number of men lurking on and around her, the plan to use her to transport tonight is still on, which is a good indication that Nate is still alive. Even though Eliot now has to decide whether to take out the seven armed lurkers now, or wait until Hvam shows up with Nate so that things don’t look abnormal to him when they do arrive.

He settles down back away from the docks in a parklike area with trees and a fountain. It’s the middle of the day. Eliot _could_ take out Hvam’s men in the middle of the day and probably not be seen doing it, but it’s not a sure thing. He listens, instead, as Alec gives Parker addresses to recon, places Hvam is known to have space and which space might give him a place to keep Nate until he’s sure about Nate’s commitment to their plans.

He watches the boat, and after about three hours, people start coming on board. It’s not completely obvious that they’re under armed guard or that they’re drugged, but Eliot is watching for it, and in a little under and hour and a half, thirty young, beautiful people are escorted aboard the craft and led down into the hold. Parker is still looking, and time is growing short now.

Half an hour later, Alec, who is monitoring the bugs Parker is planting says, “Got him,” in a tight, unhappy voice. “I heard two of Hvam’s goons talking about the rich idiot with the boat. Hvam has him at the Regency Hyatt, under guard, but we may still have time to get him out from there. Eliot?”

“I can’t get from here to there in time,” Eliot says grimly. “Better if I stay put and catch them as they board.” The Regency Hyatt is an unexpected hiccup in their plans, not one of Hvam’s places at all, and not somewhere Parker would have ever thought about reconning without Alec’s information. “Parker?”

“I can get there,” she says. “But I don’t know if I can get him out without making a scene.” She is quiet for a few seconds. “But if I can get in as a member of the staff, I can probably slip him an earbud.”

It’s about what Eliot thought. “They’ll be leaving there soon to make it to the boat in time. Are you sure you can…”

Parker laughs throatily. “Trust me,” she says, and of course, Eliot does, and smiles a little. 

“They’ve loaded the boat,” Eliot reports. “We’ve got about thirty non-combatants, probably drugged to keep them docile, and a dozen armed guards, about half of them on deck and around the dock, the other half down with the cargo. If we want minimum risk for the cargo, we need to take out that group first, so if things get hectic above decks, they don’t get nervous and start shooting people. How long?”

“A little over an hour before they’re scheduled to cast off,” Alec says. “Then, unexpectedly, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes with Sophie. She can wait in the van, and I’ll back you up.”

“You?” Sophie says, startled, almost the first time she’s spoken since they’ve been working the problem.

“I’ve been getting lessons,” Alec says. “At the very least, I’m a distraction while Eliot takes care of the guys with the guns.”

He’ll be way more than that, of course, with his new abilities, and the idea of having competent backup on a job for the team is new and a little startling to Eliot, but makes his lips curl into a smile.

“He and Parker are both taking lessons,” Eliot tells Sophie. “And they both are doing well enough that I trust them to keep themselves safe.”

After a slight pause, Sophie says, “You know, when Nate and I realized the three of you were…” she pauses delicately, “ together, it didn’t occur to us that you’d be… sharing skills.”

“It goes all three ways,” Alec says easily. “I’ve got Parker on computer detail and Eliot is getting close to being able to handle his own if we need him to retrieve data from a closed system. They both need a little more practice, which we’ll surely get on the job, but yeah. We’re rounding each other out. How did you figure it out?”

Sophie laughs, sounding a little more relaxed than she has since she’d come to them with this problem. “Eliot, a little,” she says, and Eliot jerks a little in surprise. “We always had suspicions about Parker and Hardison eventually getting together, but suddenly Eliot was calling you by your first name and touching you both, casually, like he does it all the time. Parker a little bit, just in the way that she was suddenly so comfortable with both of you. And you can’t keep your eyes off of either of them,” she tells Alec. “The two of them were acting differently, but we might have written that off as just getting comfortable with each other finally, letting down walls, but you look at them and smile and your face is an open book.”

Alec makes an uncomfortable noise.

Sophie laughs. “This is the first time you’ve been in love, isn’t it?” she asks gently, startling Eliot again a little with the L word. Alec doesn’t say anything. Sophie says, “The first time is always the most obvious. Don’t fret about it. We honestly wouldn’t have started anything this big without the three of you if we had realized how big it was going to get. We were just trying to give you some time to yourselves to enjoy being young and in love.” She sounds a little wistful.

“We can hash out the particulars of our love lives later,” Eliot says a little stiffly. “Hardison, get to the docks. Parker, get Nate an earbud if you can, and if you can’t, follow him and Hvam as closely as you can do it without looking like that’s what you’re doing and keep us updated on their movements.”

“On it,” Parker says, and it sounds like she’s smiling.

“I’ll be there in twenty,” Alec says, and then to Sophie says, “I’ve got to get a few things. Meet me at the van.”

Fifteen minutes later, Nate says, “Thank you, I must have dropped it,” to someone who is most likely Parker, his voice clear and strong in the earbud. “Are we taking my limo?” he asks someone else.

The accented voice that answers is most likely Hvam. “No, we have cars waiting.”

Eliot listens to Nate and Hvam have a perfectly civil conversation, none of it hinting at anything illegal, but merely hashing out the details of a continuing working relationship if tonights plans go well.

About eight minutes after that, he senses Alec more than hears him, and Alec drops onto the bench Eliot is sitting on, decked out in his fighting leathers, and with a short blade sheathed to his hip. 

“Plan?” he asks, sounding a little like he’s excited to be in on the action part of the job for a change, and Eliot smiles at him. 

“They’ve got a routine rotation going on. In about six minutes, we should be able to slip through their perimeter and onto the boat. The guys on deck are all walking a set pattern, and they’ll be a little harder to get through, we may have to quietly remove one of them to from play, but getting down to the cargo area shouldn’t be a problem. What did you bring me?”

Alec unslings a long bag from over his shoulder and zips it open, revealing two swords, one short and one longer, but neither of them them one of the really long blades. “Just so I’m clear, we do this with our fists if we can. The weapons only come into play if the prisoners are in direct danger.”

“Exactly,” Eliot says, standing up and threading the swords through his belt and tying the sheaths to his thighs. “We don’t kill unless we have to do it to protect the cargo. Everyone on board is armed though, so we don’t hesitate if it comes to that. But we’ve spent a lot of time on disarming gunman, so I think you’ll do okay. We spread out as soon as we’re below decks, to make sure anyone who tries to shoot at us can’t take us both down at once. If it helps, I doubt they’ll be using their guns. They won’t want to chance risking the noise and having someone call the cops. And between the two of us, we should be able to take them down in just a few minutes.” Eliot stands up and twists his neck a little, popping it, and Alec makes a face.

“I hate it when you do that, man. It makes me think your head is going to pop right off and roll away.” 

Eliot laughs softly. “Okay, two minutes. Follow my lead.”

With Nate and Hvam still talking cordially in his earbud, Eliot glides out from the little park area, draws in close to the perimeter line of the guards around the Gloria, and waits for the break he’d measured out while he’d been waiting. When he moves, Alec is right on his heels, moving low and quick, stepping exactly where Eliot steps, and then they’re through the perimeter and closing in on the ship. 

“Three ways on board,” Eliot whispers. “We’re going to board the ship docked next to this one and jump across. You can make it?”

Alec glances at the two ships, and just nods. The circle around the Gloria and onto the the Sweet Christine, docked next to it, and around to the back of the other boat. Eliot crouches on the rail, watching the movement of the guards. Alec stands behind him, waiting and watching, and there’s no way to get across without taking at least one of the men on deck out of play, so Eliot waits until he draws close and passes, then springs across the fifteen feet or so between the two boats and lands silently behind the guard, pressing one hand over his mouth and hooking his elbow around his throat in a simple choke hold. He hears Alec land behind him, and in two minutes the guard is unconscious and limp in Eliot’s grasp.

“In here,” Alec says, and gestures toward a low metal cabinet that he’s opened and cleared out, dumping life vests and various other nautical equipment overboard so silently Eliot hadn’t heard him doing it. Eliot shoves the guard into the little metal cupboard and they shut him in.

“This way, stop when I stop,” Eliot says, and circles around the cabin of the ship, pausing when one of the guards crosses their trajectory, and then sprinting the twenty feet or so to the steps down to the cargo hold. No one cries out in alarm, and the hold door is open, so Eliot and Alec merely jump down, not bothering with the steps, landing lightly. The cargo area is lushly decorated, the carpet thick, chairs and sofas arranged around the open space, a wetbar and a big screen TV on one wall. 

The prisoners are all huddled back against one grouping of furniture, their hands twisted in front of them with plastic zip ties, and their eyes dull and glazed, clearly aware enough to be scared, but not enough to be panicked. 

The guards are all facing the group of them, their backs to the entry, and Eliot makes a little gesture indicating Alec go to the left, and himself pads to the right, directly up behind a pair of guards that are still oblivious to their presence. He grabs two of them, one hand on the sides of each of their skulls, and slams their heads together. One staggers and goes down. The other lets out a soft gasp and shakes his head, starting to turn. Eliot elbows him in the throat, and the guard’s eyes roll up to reveal the whites and he falls to the floor.

The other guards are all turning now, and Eliot swings a kick into the side of the next guard’s head. He whirls all the way around, his gun dropping to the floor, soundless on the carpet, and Eliot moves on to the next man, who is raising his gun -- Eliot is annoyed, both with himself and with the guard, to see that his gun has a silencer on it; he hadn’t noticed any silencers while he’d been watching, so hadn’t taken them into account. Eliot slams a fist down across his wrist, hearing the crack of bone, and the guard drops his gun and shouts, the first sound out of any of them. As Eliot is drawing back to slam his fist into the man’s midsection, Alec whips a hand across the side of his throat, and the shout cuts off in the middle. Eliot shoves his palm flat into the man’s solar plexus, and the air whooshes out of him. He goes down to his knees, and Eliot brings a knee up into the side of his head. He topples sideways, bleeding from the nose, unconscious.

Alec pulls out a handful of zip ties, and they secure the bad guys with quick precision, and drag them over into a corner, out of sight of anyone that might look down into the cargo area from above deck.

“Nice hit,” Eliot says, and resists the urge to pull Alec into a quick and messy kiss. Alec’s eyes are bright with excitement and glittering with adrenaline, and he’d taken down two of the guards single handedly without either of them making a noise. His knuckles are scraped -- Eliot can smell the blood -- but he seems otherwise uninjured. Eliot lifts Alec’s scraped knuckles up to his lips and slides his tongue across them, and the scrapes vanish. Alec gives him a soft look.

“What do we do with them?” he asks, gesturing toward the human cargo. They haven’t moved, had just watched the fight in silence, clearly too drugged to recognize the change in their circumstances. 

“Leave them for now. They’re drugged. Letting them loose wouldn’t do any good, and we can’t risk them wandering up above decks.” He turns his attention to the guard’s weapons and breaks them all down into harmless pieces with quick practiced motions.

“Nate, we’ve got the guards on the prisoners disabled,” Eliot says. “Parker, are you still close to Nate.”

Parker’s voice is accompanied by the unmistakable sound of a motorcycle engine as she answers. “Right behind them. They’re maybe twelve minutes from the boat.”

“Okay, so here is what we do,” Eliot says. “Nate and Hvam will come on board, possibly with more guards. Paker?”

“They have four with them including the driver,” Parker says.

“Okay, that brings our total to ten. The guy we took out above decks probably won’t be missed before they get here. Once Nate is out of Hvam’s car, Parker, hang back far enough that they don’t tag you. Once they actually get on board, get to us as fast as you can. Nate, I need you to decide to need a drink or the bathroom. That should lead Hvam and you and maybe just two or three guards down to the cargo hold. Nate, actually get behind the bar or go into the bathroom. There could be shooting, and we don’t have time to make sure you aren’t in the line of fire. I’ll take out Hvam. Sophie, once they’re on board, you call the authorities. Alec, you take care of whatever guards Hvam brings down with him. Parker, the perimeter guards will probably either leave the area, or join the rest of the guard on deck. It’s dark enough up top for you to pick your way through them one by one. Keep doing that until they’re all down or until Alec and I come up and join you to help you take out the rest of them. Does anyone have any questions.”

“I have a tranquilizer gun,” Parker says, sounding pleased with herself. “I shouldn’t have to get on board to take out guards on the deck.”

“Even better,” Eliot says, wondering briefly why Parker has a tranquilizer gun, but deciding that it’s unimportant for the time being. 

“Sophie, report that you saw people being carried aboard the Gloria struggling. That will get the harbor patrol here faster than anything else.” Eliot pauses. “Hvam is a fighter,” he says. “He’s not going to go down easy. Alec, are you going to be all right two or three on one while I take care of him?”

Alec says. “I also have a tranquilizer gun,” and pulls out a tranquilizer pistol from a holster at the small of his back. “If you’ll stay out of my way, I can take down anyone that comes down with Nate without you having to go hand to hand with the big boss.”

“Where did you two get tranquilizer guns?” Eliot demands.

“We discussed it and decided that until we were a little better trained, tranquilizer guns would help even the odds a little. Especially if you were ever in trouble in a fight. With tranquilizer guns, even if we can’t get a clean shot off, the worst that happens is that you take a little nap,” Parker says.

“If either of you ever shoots me with a tranquilizer gun, I’ll be seriously irate,” Eliot says, but he can clearly hear his own fond amusement, and suddenly feels a little bit stupid that he hadn’t thought that Sophie and Nate would realize something was going on between the three of them. “I’ll be back with the prisoners,” Eliot says. “How many shots do you have in that thing?”

“Six,” Alec says.

“Mine is a rifle,” Parker says. “I’ve got twelve.”

Eliot thinks for a minute. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. Someone let me know if you can’t get a bead on a target, and I’ll take care of any of those hand to hand.”

“Three minutes,” Parker says. “I”m parking the bike and coming in on foot, it’s too noisy, so for a few minutes, I won’t be right on Nate. So don’t do anything stupid, Nate.”

Nate doesn’t respond, still carrying on a business conversation with Hvam, so he seems safe enough for the moment.

Eliot takes his place in front of the prisoners and waits. A few minutes pass, and then the boat rocks gently as several people climb on board from the dock side. Nate says, “It’s going to be a beautiful night for sailing. Can I get anyone a drink?”

Hvam says, “Why not? To celebrate our partnership.”

Footsteps cross the deck and start down the stairs to the cargo area, and Hardison raises his tranquilizer pistol in a solid shooter’s grip. Nate comes down first, and moves to stand behind the bar, making a show of setting out glasses and choosing a decanter. 

Hvam comes down behind him, two guards at his back, both of their weapons holstered. Apparently Nate had done a solid job of making Hvam believe they are on the same page. When the fourth man is almost all the way down the stairs, Alec starts shooting. Hvam goes down first, a dart in his neck, and the other two quickly follow. Eliot secures the three of them with zip ties even as he can hear bodies falling to the deck above him. There are a few shouts of alarm, but no gunshots ring out.

“Parker?” Eliot asks. 

“Missing one,” she says, and Eliot sprints up the stairs and even as his feet hit the wood of the deck he hears a soft hissing and a thump, and a man falls almost at his feet.

“Found him,” Parker says cheerfully. 

Sirens erupt into the night. Eliot zip ties all the bad guys Parker had taken out quickly.

“Time to get out of here,” Eliot says. “Nate, I trust this boat can’t be traced back to you?” he asks.

“No, it actually belongs to the mob,” Nate says, sounding pleased with himself. Nate wipes down the surfaces he’d touched with a few practiced swipes of a handkerchief, and says, “I take it the van is close?”

They get off the boat and back to the parking area just in time to avoid a half a dozen harbor patrol cars closing in on the Gloria. Sophie throws her arms around Nate and he slips a hand through her hair.

“No more going off the reservation,” Alec says as he gets behind the wheel and starts the engine. The side door swings open and Parker climbs in, sliding her rifle onto the floorboard under the middle seat. “Next time, you let us worry about our alone time when you decide to plan a job,” he scolds.

They back out of the parking area and exit onto the highway at the closest available ramp.

“It was supposed to be a simple job,” Nate mutters, but he sounds properly chastened.

“They always are,” Eliot says. 

The five of them fall silent for several minutes as Alec guides the van through traffic, heading in the direction of Nate’s apartment/the office.

Eliot notices that Nate and Sophie are holding hands, but doesn’t mention it. Parker, in the back, scoots forward and rests her chin on the seat back between Nate and Sophie. “So if we’re out of the closet, does that mean the two of you are going to tell us about you?” she asks with open curiosity.

Nate looks down at his hand in Sophie’s, and Sophie looks at Nate.

“We’re taking it slow,” Nate says finally, and Sophie smiles.


	24. Chapter 24

A nest, as opposed to a clan family, it turns out, is what happens when a single vampire or a small handful of vampires turn their backs on what passes for vampire civilization, which is to say, that slice of self-control that keeps most vampires from simply going on a rampage and killing every human that crosses his or her path, and strike off on their own, locating and securing a lair, and then begin what the vampires refer to as a turning frenzy. Instead of merely killing and drinking down any available human, the vampires start turning the ones they hunt, building up a powerbase. In the end, according to the archives, this ends in one of two ways. The birth of a new clan family, if the vampires involved have enough control and forethought and the desire to create one, or it ends up with the local clan families eventually tracking down and destroying the nest out of sheer self-preservation. A nest of vampires that isn’t intent on building a power base and creating a clan family has only one purpose, which is to hunt people and build a stronger nest, but there is a tipping point. A nest can only get so big before people start taking notice of the rash of missing persons that is involved, and then the new vampires in the nest want to start doing things like turning their friends and families. These kinds of interconnected disappearances leave a trail that the police can eventually piece together, and the clan families that run major cities take steps to cull the nests to keep their secrets safe.

When Alec locates what he thinks is the starting stages of a nest in the central city, they decide to monitor it and wait for the vampires operating out of the Broadmoor to take care of it. After more than a week, when this hasn’t happened, Alec takes the dangerous step of hacking once again into the Broadmoor’s intranet to find out why.

Apparently, the leader of this nest is a pair of vampires named Katherine and Desmond, and they are among the favorites of the leader of the de Beauvois clan family, which doesn’t want to take action against the nest until it becomes clear that the two scions involved aren’t creating their own clan family, which, if they are, the vampires of the Broadmoor will apparently help to finance and establish. Arguments for this possibility include that it will broaden the Broadmoor’s power base, and that Katherine and Desmond have been stable and productive members of clan de Beauvois for years, and are considered to be rational, useful members of the family. Arguments against this possibility are that neither of the two had made the kinds of plans or gained the approval of their respective master vampires before disappearing into the night. The Broadmoor vampires are adopting a ‘wait and see’ attitude.

After some investigation, Alec tells Parker and Eliot that he doesn’t think the two vampires have any intention of forming a new clan family. People are disappearing, yes, and in alarming numbers, but a great deal of those people are turning up dead in various far flung parts of the city. Alec thinks the pair have decided that they are bored with living within the vampires normally strict codes of secrecy, drinking only enough blood to live, and have decided to strike out on their own, maybe with the eventual goal of creating a clan family, but with the more immediate goal of getting drunk on human blood at will, without the clan families interfering with their fun.

If this turns out to be the case, they can’t afford to wait to deal with it. Every night that passes gives the two vampires opportunities to create more vampires and strengthen the nest. From the list of disappearances compared to the list of bodies discovered, Alec guesses that there are between eight and twelve vampires already in the nest, and every night that passes only creates the potential for that number to go up. Not only that, but Katherine and Desmond are old vampires, not centuries or anything, but old enough to have full control of their powers and abilities, not like the solo nightwalkers the three of them have been so far stalking and taking out.

To makes matters a little more complicated, rumors among the Broadmoor vampires are circulating about the possibility of there being a Daywalker in their territory. Every vampire they’ve killed has been link marked to at least the vampire that created it, and their deaths have not gone unnoticed. In their favor, according to Alec, is that the vampires the three have been killing have all been cut off from vampire society, considered rogue because of their inability to blend into the sea of humanity and hide what they are. Also in their favor is that even with rumors of a Daywalker circulating, it hasn’t been seriously considered because the vampires live so long and so differently that it takes more than a few weeks and a few dead rogues to set off alarm bells for them.

If they take out the nest, there will be no question about whether or not there is a Daywalker (or three) in the vamps territory. If they don’t, if they wait for the Broadmoor vampires to decide to do it for them, there is no telling how long it will take, or how strong the nest will become in the meantime. And the death toll will grow bigger.

Alec tracks down property deeds and blueprints and builds a comprehensive breakdown of what the property the nest is using looks like inside and out, and Parker stakes out the building, using her flawless ability to sense a vampire in a crowd to pinpoint and take pictures of the new vampires. Eliot gets in touch with an ammunition specialist via the Daywalker’s electronic contact system, and orders a scary amount of specialized ammunition, which the dealer breaks down for him in order of the effectiveness of each type on a vampire along with the price of each type. The more effective the ammo is, the more expensive it is. Eliot tells him that price is not a factor, and suddenly the ammo dealer can provide them with both rifle and shotgun ammunition packed with tiny, wickedly sharp flechettes that will tear holes in a vampire and poison them, impeding their ability to heal at the same time, as well as things like flash bangs and other military and police grade ordinance, and is willing to get it to them in two days, payment arranged via wire transfer, pickup arranged for anonymously at a prearranged location outside of Portland far enough that Eliot is comfortable with it not being traced back to their city. At least until they start using it.

Alec builds dossiers on the new vampires Parker brings him pictures of, and it’s going in the direction that seems the most likely to eventually bring real law enforcement into the case. Katherine and Desmond are turning random people, and those random people are turning their friends and family, and that leaves the kind of trail that the cops will eventually be able to trace. This particular nest, run by two older and more experienced vampires, is much more careful about getting rid of bodies than the solo vamps they’ve been hunting have been, but Alec manages to track down police reports that indicate extreme blood loss along with, in most cases, dismemberment. The cops think the victims are being killed elsewhere, dismembered, and dumped, due to the lack of blood, but Alec knows what to look for, and the cops don’t. The body count rises to ten and then thirteen, and then, nine days after Alec first tracks down the nest, fifteen, and the Broadmoor vamps, according to their internal communications, have no plans to do anything beyond watch and wait.

The nest adds another two vampires to their stable, bringing the total to fourteen that Parker has been able to identify, and they decide that they can’t wait any longer for the vampires to decide to act.

The building the nest is occupying is a warehouse converted into a loft, the last blueprints on file with the city indicating three floors. They scope the building out carefully, boh via the blueprints, in person, and with pictures from Parker, who turns out to be an artist with a good camera. The security system is one Alec is sure he can disable from the outside, without having to get close to the building, and there are only two exits on ground level. There are fire escapes on two sides of the building, but the windows that lead to them, according the blueprints, have been either removed, or blocked with interior walls. Only the top floor has actual windows. Parker’s pictures show these to be heavily covered with both thick drapes and what look to Eliot like military grade metal security shutters.

The front entrance opens onto the street and leads into a foyer with an elevator. The back entrance opens into a maintenance area with fire stairs. They obviously will be going in the back way.

This will be nothing like what they’ve been doing so far, and they are all grimly aware of it. Fourteen vampires on their home territory, all of them strong and well fed. Several of them very new vampires, which evens the odds a little, but at least two older and wiser vampires running the show, and they have no experience with the older ones, excepting for that first one, their first kill, and he had been taken completely by surprise. Still, he had been strong and fast enough to take all three of them to kill him. They hadn’t been equipped for it and the link marks hadn’t been active at the time, which they all hope will make a difference.

Eliot has had custom holsters made for their shotguns and rifles, so they can wear them across their backs. He has a double brace of silver plated throwing knives for both himself and for Parker. Alec is not yet good enough with them for him to bother with them. Alec, however, is probably the most effective of them with the long sword, not only a little faster than Eliot with it, but also just with a longer reach. Parker’s ability with a long sword is on par with Alec’s ability with throwing knives. She can use them, but she’s small, and the long blade gets in the way of her natural style of fighting. She opts for two of the shorter blades, one strapped to each thigh, and manages to tuck a half dozen stakes into loops and sheathes on her fighting leathers. Two more go into the custom boots, which have finally come in. Eliot goes with only six stakes, and two swords, one long, one short, and Alec confidently handles two long swords and a half dozen stakes. Eliot had also put in custom orders of silver crosses for each of them in a variety of sizes. Eliot picks out two and tucks them under his clothes -- according to the Daywalker’s archive, they’ll glow in the presence of vampires, and Eliot doesn’t want the glow announcing their presence. Parker takes three, loops one around her neck and tucks it into her leathers, and the other two vanish up her sleeves. Alec only takes one, tucking it under his leathers as well. He has vials of holy water, which are supposed to work a little bit like phosphorous grenades, which is to say that when the water hits the vamp it burns until there is nothing left to burn. They each take two vials and tuck them into pockets. Parker, who is better with a rifle than Alec, takes the ten shot SKS, and Alec takes the six shot Binelli, the barrel sawed off to a thoroughly illegal length. Eliot takes what he’s comfortable with, an AK-47, which is a bigger gun, holding 30 rounds, and is probably overkill since Eliot doesn’t have much intention of using it, but he’s familiar with it from the Rangers, knows what it can do and how to use it to best effect, and if it comes down to it, he knows he can cut someone in half with it. He’s thinking of Katherine and Desmond when he slings the gun onto his back.

“Remember not to look the older two in the eyes,” Eliot says as they gear up and then check each other’s gear to make sure it’s all secure. “It’s the middle of the day, and we don’t have any indication that they have taken on any human servants that we might have to take out, but we can’t count on them all being helpless. According to the archive, the older the vampire gets, the more likely it is to be able to move around during daylight hours as long as it stays out of the sun. Most likely, we’ll find them on the top floor, but we can’t count on that. We have to search every floor. Alec, you’re on rear guard. If Parker and I take one out without taking its head, it’s your job to take the head. I don’t want any of them we think we’ve taken out getting up and coming up behind us. As soon as we get in the building, we spread out, so we can’t all be taken out at once. But we stay in sight of one another. Nobody goes off on their own.”

Alec passes out earbuds. “I don’t know that they’re really necessary, but it can’t hurt to be safe.”

“Neither of you have been in a firefight before,” Eliot says grimly. “There’s no way for me to really prepare you for what it’s like without that experience. It’s loud and confusing. Concentrate on using your other senses if guns come into play, because your hearing is going to be fubar. Stay in a line, shoulders lined up, so we don’t risk shooting one another. If we can’t stay in a line, do your best to make sure you aren’t catching one of us in your crossfire zone. Hopefully this won’t matter. They’ll all be asleep and the guns won’t come into play at all. But if you need them, use them. Especially on Katherine and Desmond. They’re old enough that taking them out from a distance is distinctly advantageous to us. We don’t know enough about their mind powers to let them have the chance to use them on us.”

Eliot checks the safety on all three of the guns, and then pats himself down one last time, checking that everything is where he expects it to be, and that the can draw anything he needs quickly and without anything getting hung up. He watches Alec and Parker doing the same things to themselves.

“This is not like anything we’ve done on cons,” Eliot tells them both softly. “This is combat, and you’ve got to keep your head and keep your focus. It will be different, but we have the advantage of daylight, and of the link marks.”

“Fourteen against three,” Alec says, his voice low and a little distant sounding. “The newest two are still going through their first few days of being feral. They probably won’t wake up at all. But Desmond and Katherine made all of these vampires themselves. They’ll all be linked. As soon as we take out one, if the two of them have the capacity to move around during the day, they’ll be awake and aware of us being there.”

“There’s no way to be sure where they are in the building or we could make sure to take them out first,” Parker says. “We’re just going to have to risk it.”

She checks the draw on her SKS again, and then nods. “Daylight is wasting. We’ve done all we can do to make this go right. All we can do now is do it and deal with it however it happens.” There is a glitter of bright excitement in her eyes that makes Eliot frankly a little nervous.

Alec is grim and solemn, clearly doing what he feels what has to be done, but Parker is crackling with energy. She’s ready for a fight. She wants it. Wants the chance to pit herself up against the vampires and find out if she’s good enough.

Eliot is somewhere in between. He’s doing it because it has to be done, but he was built for combat, trained for it, had done it for years and still does it now, when he hasn’t been a Ranger in more than a decade. He can feel the thrill of the impending fight, but he also knows all the kinds of things that can go wrong during combat. Parker doesn’t have that frame of reference. Neither does Alec really, but he seems to intuit it on some level. He’s wary. Not scared. None of them are really scared. They’d be able to feel it in the links if they were. But Alec is aware that he’s about to do something that he’s never done before and he’s wary about it in a way that Parker isn’t.

They jog to the van and clamber inside, and Eliot realizes that his apartment is not going to remain an adequate headquarters for their little team. They need something more private and defensible. He owns other properties, and he makes a mental note to go through what he’s got and figure out what will work best for them. He’ll talk to Alec and Parker about it. Likely both of them have other bases that might work as well as or better than anything Eliot has.

They sit in the alley at the back entrance to the warehouse/loft for a good ten minutes, waiting for ten seconds of lack of cross traffic, and then bolt for the back door. The security system is already down, Alec had taken care of it in the car. Parker pulls out her lockpicks and make short work of all three heavy duty locks, and then they are inside in the dark, letting the door close silently behind them, blocking out the sunlight.

The bottom floor is an open space, empty even of boxes of stuff in storage. Eliot takes a few minutes to check the walls and floor for hidden escape routes. There are places on the blueprints where the walls and floors are thick enough to hide hidden opportunities for egress. He finds nothing. The door to the fire stairs is just an empty frame, no actual door, though there are signs that there had been a door there at some point. They creep upward, and Eliot hands out low light single-eye ocular headgear, which they slip on before heading into the expanse of the second floor. 

This floor is clearly a living area, luxuriously appointed, with deep carpets and little groupings of furniture, art on the walls, as well as a giant T.V. and a sound system. Eliot smells old, pressed flowers and something like talcum powder, all underlying the scent of blood, both old and new. In a nook in the corner, where bookshelves line the walls and two chairs are positioned to be convenient for either reading or conversation, there are two dead bodies. Eliot flips one of his crosses out of his leather jacket, but isn’t surprised when it doesn’t glow. They smell like dead meat, drained and left where they’d fallen. The lack of blood around them makes it all worse somehow. They’re a boy and a girl. Neither of them can be older than twenty.

Eliot checks for hidden escape routes again, and finds one this time, behind a hinged bookcase. It leads into a short brick hall and down a narrow steep staircase that is probably part of the buildings original layout.

He gets down on his knees and extracts a thin coil of nearly invisible wire from his pocket, stringing it shin high across the opening a couple of steps inside. He attaches a flashbang to the booby trap. It won’t kill a vampire trying to use this for an escape route, but it will blind and deafen it for a few minutes, and will let the three of them know that someone is trying to get out.

He closes the hinged bookcase and backs away from it, nodding to Alec and Parker toward the stairway to the third floor.

The third floor stairwell does have a door, along with a security panel which lights the small landing with a dim blue glow. Eliot searches for traps of some kind, but either there aren’t any, or he just can’t see them. The three of them start up.

“It’s internal,” Alec whispers. “Not attached to the main security system. I’m going to have to hack it.”

Eliot nods, and Alec pulls a small black oblong doodad along with a kit of tiny tools out of a pocket, and methodically begins to hook his electronics up to the security pad. “Easy,” he whispers after just a minute or so. “It’s like they’re stuck in the last decade of security equipment.” His fingers fly dexterously over the keypad, and there is a soft click. He leaves the black box thing dangling from the security keypad, and gives Eliot a nod toward the door.

Eliot takes point, easing the door open. The room is sectioned off, unlike the other two floors, which they had been expecting from the blueprints. There are walls, but no doors, only open arches leading from one area to the next, and Eliot moves through the first with all his senses on high alert. He can sense the vampires now, and he’s dividing his attention between looking for traps and positioning them on his mental map of this floor.

Parker whispers, “I can feel the difference between Katherine and Desmond and the newly turned. They feel different.”

“Where?” Eliot asks.

“All the way on the other side of this floor,” she says. “The newly turned are dead to the world.” She sounds confident. “We could stake them all in their sleep and they’d never wake up. We should be able to just move around them and get to Katherine and Desmond and take them out first.”

Eliot considers this. “We don’t know if staking their makers will wake the newly turned,” he says. “We might have to fight our way out.”

Parker shrugs one shoulder. “But we are pretty sure that staking the newly turned will wake up the older vamps. Better if we can take them out first; then we only have to worry about baby vamps that don’t know much about using their powers between us and the doors.”

Eliot silently agrees, and gives a brief nod.

They look through archways as they pass through the walled off areas. Most of them are sleeping rooms with big beds, most of the vamps sleeping in twos and threes. They smell of old paper and sage with a hint of something a little more astringent lurking underneath that mix. And of blood. They all smell of blood.

None of the vampires move as the three of them make their way through the interlocking maze of rooms and archways to the far end of the floor. They know they’re in the right place because they end up in front of an actual door, and because Eliot can sense the dark, hungry feel of vampires ahead of him, the sense of them stronger than of all the newly turned they’d passed. There is no lock on the door, and Eliot diligently checks it for traps, but finds none. He glances back over his shoulder at Parker and Alec. Parker is holding a short blade in one hand and a stake in the other. Alec has a long sword and stake. Eliot palms two of his four throwing knives and draws a stake, holding all three in one hand as he slowly turns the knob and eases the door open.

Desmond and Katherine are loosely wrapped around each other in sleep, and neither of them stir when Eliot eases into the room. Katherine is halfway on her back, one bared breast visible, and he chooses her as the easiest target, as Desmond is on his side. He glides over to the side of the bed, swaps the throwing knives into his left hand and the stake into his right, and takes careful aim. 

She wakes as he plunges the stake into her, at an angle, below the ribs and aimed upward toward the heart. He feels the wood and silver of the stake slam through her chest, feels it when the tip punctures the heart and then drives through it. Her eyes open, vividly green, and she keens, back arching, and clutches at her chest. Blood gushes from the wound, and then from her mouth. 

Before Eliot can move to pull the stake free, Desmond is up and on his feet, something long and silver in his hand, and he lunges at Eliot, who jerks to the left just in time to avoid having a long sword plunged through his throat. Katherine is clutching at the stake and attempting to pull it out, but weakly, her keening ear-splitting in the quiet room.

Alec steps forward and blocks Desmond’s next swing, aimed to take off Eliot’s head, and Eliot lets go of the stake in Katherine’s chest and takes a step to the side. Desmond lunges at him again, and he dodges, tossing one off his throwing knives, which drives into the left side of his chest, but isn’t long enough to pierce the heart. Desmond snarls and sweeps another sword stroke at Eliot, his eyes black and insane. Eliot immediately feels the pull of that gaze, and dodging again, tugs his own gaze away from Desmond’s eyes. 

Dodging proves unnecessary because Hardison blocks the swing, steps into a graceful lunge, and shoves his long sword through Desmond’s chest. It doesn’t hit the heart either, but Desmond falls back, and Parker steps in, light and lithe as a dancer, and swings her shorter blade in a precise slice that separates Desmond’s head from his shoulders in one blow. Without pausing, Parker glides to one side and brings her sword down in an overhead strike, taking Katherine’s head and stopping that piercing keening she had been making.

There is a sudden flash of warning in Eliot’s senses, the feel of the newly turned waking and feeling the deaths of their makers. Eliot jerks his stake free of Katherine’s chest and they all three turn toward the door. 

If they had been older, or more in control, the fight might have been harder. If they’d had any sense of tactics, they would have waited for Eliot, Parker and Alec to exit the room, giving themselves space to fight, but they merely swarm in, eyes black and fangs extended, and it takes almost nothing to take them out one or two at a time, as that is as many as can make it through the door at once. Hardison sweeps heads off of shoulders with easy grace, and Parker slides in beneath his cutting blade and stakes anything that gets past his guard. Eliot actually just stands back and watches them work.

There’s no room in the doorway for another body; he’d just get in their way. He recovers his thrown knife and cleans it on the bedspread, tucking both away in their sheathes, and watches Alec and Parker slide and twist and dance around each other with fluid grace and perfect awareness of one another as bodies start to pile up in the doorway and the very new vampires try to scramble over them to get their fangs into someone.

It all lasts about ninety seconds. Eliot counts heads, comes up with the right number, and watches as Parker easily and neatly separates the heads from the bodies of the vampires she’d staked.

When the last vampire falls, Alec throws a look over his shoulder and says, “Nice of you to help out.”

“There wasn’t room in the doorway for three, and the two of you didn’t need my help.” They are both splattered with blood, but neither of them has a scratch on them. He sheathes his bloody stake. “We should be getting out of here as soon as possible, though. The newly turned don’t matter, but whomever turned Katherine and Desmond will have felt their link marks sever.”

Hardison’s face turns serious. He wipes his blade on the comforter and sheathes it. His stake, unused, disappears into his boot. Parker calmly wipes down her own weapons and stows them, and looks disgustedly at the carnage on the floor in the hall. She takes a handful of steps back, then sprints forward, vaulting over the blood and bodies, and landing on the blood free floor beyond them.

“It’s best not to leave boot tracks,” Eliot says, and performs approximately the same leap.

“I just didn’t want to get blood on my boots,” Parker says airily.

Hardison makes the leap, his longs legs carrying him easily over the bodies, though he lands a little harder.

They pause on the second floor for Eliot to remove his booby trap and retrieve his flash bang, and Hardison collects his electronic breaking and entering tools. Then they stand in the back doorway of the converted loft until there is a lull in foot traffic long enough for them to sprint to the van without it being obvious that they’re covered in blood and armed to the teeth.

Hardison maintains the speed limit on the way back to Eliot’s apartment -- no good would be come of getting pulled over by the cops right now -- and they go in the side door.

They strip off their leathers and take turns in the shower, Eliot patiently showing Alec and Parker how to get blood off of their leathers. They clean their weapons more thoroughly.

They don’t talk much, beyond Eliot issuing instructions and the occasional question from either Alec or Parker. They aren’t tired. The fight had been easier than any of them could have reasonably expected, considering the odds.

“I don’t feel anything about killing them,” Alec finally says. His tone is harshly neutral. “The newly turned were about as dangerous as kittens, and I don’t feel bad.”

“They would have become much more dangerous in very short order,” Eliot says. “And those kittens, along with their makers, are responsible for seventeen dead that we’re absolutely sure of, along with an unknown number of others that the cops may have missed. They aren’t human. These, in particular, were only going to get more dangerous because there was nothing constraining them. They’d left behind whatever vampire laws keep them from becoming mass murderers.”

“We need to find out about those laws,” Parker says. She slumps onto the couch with a cup of coffee in her hands, her hair loosely tied back, wearing yoga pants and a sports bra and looking pink and freshly scrubbed. “There is some kind of code out there that keeps the clan families from acting like this, something that works on the side of the humans. We know the Broadmoor vamps have humans that go up but don’t come back down, but we don’t know that they’re actually killing them. Alec, you said they have human servants. Maybe the ones that don’t come back down are just… joining the clan family.” She makes a little face and takes a sip of her coffee. “Personally, our experiences with vampires have all been with the ones on the wrong side of vampire law. If there is something in vampire law that protects us, humans, I mean, then… then killing _them_ would feel wrong.”

“You only want to kill non law-abiding vampires?” Alec asks, looking a little amused, but his tone serious.

“It depends on what the laws are,” Parker says, still staring down at her coffee cup. “The newly turned never had a chance to decide not to kill to live,” she points out. “They never got to choose whether or not to become monsters. But you even said, Alec, that first night, that they don’t have to kill to feed. And considering how many of them there are, obviously most of them don’t, or there would be a lot more bodies. That first vampire we killed even; we don’t know that he was going to kill her. Just that he was feeding off her.” She sounds uneasy now.

“There’s nothing solid about vampire law in the Daywalkers archives,” Alec says. “There are a few hints and a few solid facts, but no one knows what rules they live under to get by in human society. The rest of the Daywalkers…” he pauses, then stands us and goes to stand behind Parker to rub her neck gently. “They don’t want to know. As far as they’re concerned, they’re all the same. Monsters that feed off of human blood.”

“But,” Eliot says. “ _We_ feed off of human blood. We don’t kill, but that definitely isn’t something the other Daywalkers do. They drink vamp blood, maybe only once, but maybe with every kill, which gives them the abilities to take down vamps, so they assume that taking down vamps is what they are there for.”

“Every time they kill a vamp,” Alec supplies. “They’re like us, that way. Their superhuman abilities diminish over time if they don’t drink from a vamp and recharge.”

“We need more information,” Parker says, speaking sofly, but looking up to meet Eliot’s eyes. “I don’t feel bad about Desmond and Katherine. But I feel bad about the newly turned, the ones that didn’t have a chance to choose. We didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t let the nest get any bigger, and the main clan families obviously had chosen not to get involved, but I feel like…” She blinks rapidly. “They’re like us. We are all criminals, but we choose to do things to help people. Maybe the clan families in the Broadmoor aren’t helping people, but if they’re not actively harming people, what right do we have to take their lives?”

Alec bends down and kisses the top of her head. “I’ll see what I can find out. I get the feeling that hacking into the Vampire Council’s database is going to be on par with hacking into the Pentagon, but.” He shrugs. “I’ve done that before.”

“There’s will be no question about us now, though,” Eliot says. “Once the rest of the vamps find out what happened to the nest, they’re going to be sure there is a Daywalker in their territory. We’re going to have to be careful, more careful, and this apartment is not secure enough, it’s too public. I have a couple of other properties that might be suitable. What about the two of you?”

“I have a World War II bunker with interior parking built under a parking garage with no camera security within four blocks,” Parker says immediately. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I only use it to hide things I steal. I can clear it out. It’s got plenty of space for all of us and an arsenal of weapons.”

Hardison whistles. “How did you get your hands on that?” he asks.

She grins impishly. “I bought the parking garage and made sure the information about the bunker disappeared from all public, private, and military records. I actually only managed to get it out of military records last month. From learning things from you.”

“What building does the parking garage service?” Eliot asks.

“High-rise condos,” Parker says. “It’s got it’s own separate entrance and security. If you don’t know to look for it, you’ll never know it’s there.”

Alec holds up his hands. “She’s got me beat. All I own are apartments. I don’t do yard work.” 

“Okay,” Eliot says. “Parker, you get to work on making that space livable. I’ll help you with that, since I’ve got nothing better to really do. Alec can see if he can hack the Vampire Council. In the meantime, I think we just keep doing what we’re doing. Taking out the solo vamps that are killing when they feed, and practicing our asses off with our weapons of choice. Which reminds me, Alec, I want to get you together with the swordmaster who is teaching me long blades. You’re better at them than I am, and you’ve only been getting lessons second hand, from me.”

Hardison’s brow furrows a little. “Can we do that without hooking me up with a file number and a code name and a reference.”

“I think I can. I’ll ask him about it personally. The question is, are you willing to put the time into it?”

“The long blade feels right in my hands,” he says, sounding more confident. “I get the feeling that it’s my ideal weapon, if you get what I mean. The thing I’ll end up being best at. So yeah. I’ll put in the time.”

“All right. We have some plans then.”


	25. Chapter 25

When Eliot brings up referring a friend to the swordmaster during their next lesson, the older man looks thoughtfully at him. “You are good with a long blade,” he says, his voice accented faintly with Japanese. “But you are always going to be better with a shorter weapon. Your build and your experience make you better with shorter weapons. You will never be a master long swordsman.”

Eliot nods, not surprised. “I do my best, but I know it isn’t my area. I need to learn to do it as well as I can, but my friend’s… he’s been getting second hand lessons from me, and he’s already better at it.”

“Will you join me for tea?” the man asks.

Eliot blinks. It’s the first time the man has ever said anything to him that didn’t specifically have to do with swordsmanship.

“Sure,” Eliot says.

The man leads him out of the front area of the dojo and into a back room, which proves to be small, but comfortable living quarters, sparsely furnished in traditional Japanese style. The man busies himself brewing tea in the traditional Japanese way, and Eliot busies himself looking at the wall of weapons that lines the east side of the room. They are all obviously masterworks of their kind. He doesn’t have even the slightest urge to ask to touch them. He would bet any amount of money that the swordsmaster is an expert at every weapon on the wall. Among them, down near the base of the wall and balanced on two wooden pegs driven into the wall itself, is a silver moulded stake. It can’t be mistaken for anything else.

“Please, sit,” the man says. “My name is Hirota Isamu. Not my real name, of course.” He smiles serenely. “Names wear out as one moves through life, and sometimes must be shed like the skins of snakes. What may I call you?”

“Eliot,” Eliot says. “Which is my real name, but I’ll keep my last name to myself.”

“Wise,” Hirota says. “When you came to me to learn the art of the long sword for killing of the vampires, I expected you to be like most of my students. Fast, stronger than normal, graceful. But you are more than that, even if your best skill is not with a long blade.” Hirota pulls up the sleeve of his gi shirt and shows Eliot a mark. It’s an abstract mark, like Eliot’s both are, but looks a bit like an infinitely complicated snowflake in blue and silver and white. When he’s sure that Eliot has had a good look, the pulls his sleeve down, and then unties the belt of his gi. His shirt falls open, and Eliot sees a second mark along his collar bone, red and brown fading into silver. It looks a little like part of a fern. “I have not seen your marks, but I am certain that you have two, as well. Among the Daywalkers, I may be the only person you ever meet that understands what it means to have two.”

Eliot closes his mouth, trying to think what to say.

Hirota says, “My triumvirate and I raged across Japan in our youth. We destroyed many vampires. They are both dead now.” He says this as serenely as he has said everything else. “Inana died of cancer when she was only forty. We did not know, then, that if we could have found a vampire old enough, with powerful enough blood, we could have saved her. Even if we had known, we had been such a destructive force against the vampires in our area of the world, obtaining the blood would have been almost impossible. Tomas died two years ago. Old age, they say, but I think it was boredom. He had nothing left to live for. I spent some time wishing for my own death in much the same way, and then I found some purpose left in my life. I can no longer fight the vampires, but I can do this.”

He pauses and pours Eliot a cup of tea. “Thank you,” Eliot says automatically. Hirota fills his own tea cup and sets the pot to one side. 

“A triumvirate of Daywalkers is very powerful,” he says calmly. “Most vampires, of course, don’t know that such things exist, and most Daywalkers don’t know either. They are lone wolves, fighting things in the dark. They do not need to know what I can teach you. They fight the rogues and the old ones that have gone insane, and those that live only for the rush the blood gives them, and they mostly fight only one or two vampires at a time.” Hirota gives Eliot a serene look. “They work together only when a nest breaks out that the Vampire Council for some reason does not contain, and even then, their relationships with one another are superficial and fleeting. A triumvirate is another kind of magic.”

Eliot has about a thousand questions. He opens his mouth to ask one. Hirota gestures toward Eliot’s tea cup, and Eliot grudgingly picks it up and sips at it.

“I will train either or both other members of your triumvirate in whatever weapons they desire to learn. I will also swear on my own life that I will never reveal your triumvirate to anyone else. The Daywalkers would look on you with suspicion, and some of the vampires would not rest until you were all destroyed. All of that, though, is not what I wish to impart to you over tea, having exchanged names and secrets. 

“I told you that my triumvirate and I raged across Japan, destroying many vampires. Then I would have said it with pride, we did it with pride, sure that we were alleviating a great evil from the world. Only now, when Japan’s clan families are once again recovering from the destruction that my triumvirate caused, do I see the damage that we caused as we brought death to whole clan families and to the Japanese Council itself. Only now do I see that for all that we killed, a few always survived, and those few, forced into hiding with no clan families or blood servants to help them control their needs, killed more of my people then had been killed by vampires in Japan for the entire ten years previous to us coming into our powers and becoming the scourge of the vampires of my homeland. Do you understand?”

Eliot nods very slowly. “They have laws. They have some kind of code that they obey to blend in with humanity. They don’t all kill to feed. We had figured that out. We’re trying to figure out what the laws are, and how to decide what to do about vampires that obey those laws and those that don’t.”

“Then you are wiser than we were, Eliot-san,” he says, looking a little sad for the first time. “In the ancient myths of several cultures, Sun Walkers were created to police the laws that the Night Walker’s themselves put into place. They were made to mete out justice to those that did not abide to the code the Night Walker’s live by to live in balance with humanity. Some vampires, even now, remember when this was true; when Night Walkers who lived by the code had no need to fear the Sun Walkers. Strive to be what we were not,” he says, gently stressing the word ‘we.’ “Those that mete out justice, those that protect and defend not only humanity, but the code that the Night Walkers live by.”

“I don’t suppose you know what that code is?” Eliot asks.

“We never learned until it was too late, and by then there was only Hirota left, with no way to discover this information. Your Vampire Council will have it. Among them are still the very old, those that remember when the Sun Walker’s were as protective of the code as they were of humanity. If you and your triumvirate are able to demonstrate that you respect the Night Walkers that live by the code and recognize their right to exist, it may be that you can open lines of communications that have been closed for centuries.” Hirota sips his tea. “It will take time, and some of the other Sun Walkers may try to hinder you. Those that have never learned any better, and the older ones, those that truly believe that vampirism is a scourge that must be cleansed from the face of the earth. You know of these old ones?”

“No,” Eliot says. “We only know what we can find out in the Daywalker database. It doesn’t mention any old ones. Old Daywalkers, I mean.”

“Look for the ones that pull the strings, Eliot-san. Look for the ones that give the other Daywalkers the information you get from this database. And lastly, drink from your kills.”

Eliot blinks. “We’ve tried it once. It doesn’t seem to add anything to our collective or individual abilities.”

“Over time, it will come to do so, but there is a simpler reason to do so. Drinking the blood of vampires will extend your lifespans by many many decades. It will keep you young and vigorous for many times the normal human lifespan.”

“That isn’t in the database,” Eliot says, sure it would be, if the Daywalkers knew about it.

“It isn’t something that works for Daywalkers, those that gain their power by first drinking from a vampire. Only born Sun Walkers gain this boon.” Hirota drains his tea cup. “Other boons will come with time. Greater physical and mental prowess, other gifts that I have only heard as legends, but drinking the blood of the Night Walkers you kill will extend your lives. Perhaps indefinitely.”

Eliot opens his mouth to ask another question, but Hirota rises smoothly to his feet, which makes Eliot feel like he has to stand, too.

“Send your friend to me tomorrow, one or both of them,” he says. “I will make a master out of him, and discover what skills each of you possess naturally that can be honed.” He gestures Eliot toward the door.

Eliot doesn’t have to be told that he’s being dismissed. He still has dozens of questions, but he also has a lot of new information, things to pass on to Parker and Eliot, things to think about, and he’s pretty sure that he’s been given all the information Hirota intends to give him today.

“Thank you,” he says instead, and Hirota gives him a little bow.


	26. Chapter 26

It’s Alec that ends up decorating the bunker. Eliot and Parker clean it out of her stolen treasures, many of which are worth small fortunes, some of which seem to be merely things that had caught her eye, and store them in one of Eliot’s other properties, a warehouse (which Alec upgrades the security on to what he terms ‘supernova’ level), and they take care of sectioning the space off into living and working areas, Eliot teaching Parker the basics of jackleg carpentry and how to hang drywall. But when it’s done, and they have a drab, concrete floored living area with plain white walls and nothing else, Alec asks them how they plan to decorate it, and Eliot and Parker exchange mystified looks.

“Get some furniture I guess,” Eliot says. “Some of it can be moved from our apartments to here.”

Alec gives him a long, level look. “You’re planning on all three of us living and working and eating and sleeping here, yeah? This is not just a base of operations that we’re going to be storing weapons and shit in and using to make plans?”

“Yes,” Parker says. “It’s huge, there’s plenty of room for both work space and living space. There’s no reason why we should live anywhere else.”

“Then it has to be decorated. It has to be homey. Nobody wants to spend the day working their asses off and come home to…” He gestures to the concrete floors and white walls. “This.”

Eliot and Parker exchange another look, this one not quite as mystified, but still a little baffled. Eliot’s apartment is decorated in hardwood floors with comfortable and functional furniture, not exactly sparse, but not lavish or anything. Parker rotates between her properties, and of those that Eliot has seen, none of them have anything in the way of what Eliot would call personal touches. He understands what Alec means, and sees that Parker does, too, but they don’t have any idea of how to go about making something like that happen. They’ve created the space. They don’t know how to transform the space into a… home-like space.

“I’ll take care of it,” Alec says softly, when he sees the two of them looking at each other. His voice is gentle and fondly exasperated.

While this is going on, the team pulls a con on a financial portfolio manager that is investing his client’s money with the mob, basically laundering money for the mob and cleaning it up through his business. It takes a little longer than most of their jobs, and requires a lot more of Sophie’s brand of work along with Alec’s tracking of financial resources, than it does anything Eliot or Parker are needed for.

Alec has left magazines and fabric swatches and books of cloth-like wall paper samples and the like all over the bunker, and one day, because they’re bored and because they have already had sex and are relaxed and open to the idea, they grab a couple of beers and start looking through Alec’s stuff. At first they just look, mostly puzzled, with nothing more than vague interest, drinking beer and flipping through design magazines, and then Eliot sees a bed, a huge Victorian four poster with high posts and an intricately carved headboard, and he thinks of Parker’s equipment, currently still attached to his own bed in his apartment, and he asks, “Wouldn’t this be a better bed for all your toys than what I’ve got?” 

A startled look passes over Parker’s face, and she turns her attention toward the picture of the bed, and that is how it starts. They each have a room in the bunker, along with a fourth room which is understood to be ‘their’ room, so that they have both space for themselves and space to be together in, and starting with the bed, Parker and Eliot start to look through color swatches and fabric swatches and paint cards and furniture catalogues and eventually Parker pops open her laptop and pulls up the blueprints of the bunker and starts inserting furniture and notes on colors and textures. They go through almost a case of beer and are debating the merits of a waterfall in the master bath when Alec comes in from working on his case, glances at the materials scattered all around them, and smiles with something like satisfaction.

He deposits his laptop on a table and comes to sit between them on the couch, and says, “Tell me what you’re thinking,” and they do, and he tells them what they can actually do out of the wild things they’ve dreamed up, and when it comes time to actually do it, he’s the one that orders the right stuff and the workmen to come in and set it up, though it is Parker that takes care of making sure the workmen don’t remember anything about where they had been working.

It ends up being by far the most lavish and comfortably decorated space that Eliot has ever had, not opulent, but lush, with the floors done in mosaic tiles and scattered with carpets, the kitchen a masterpiece of stainless steel appliances and marble work surfaces, the master bedroom a place where the textures and styles seem to work some kind of magic, like just walking into it drains some of the stress out of Eliot, leaving his shoulders loose and his mind relaxed. Alec takes their ideas and fleshes them out and blends them together so that the whole place feels like each part of it was done to complement the other parts of it, so that each space flows into the next space seamlessly. Eliot had lived in his apartment for three years, and it takes him less than three days to consider the bunker more of a home than the apartment ever had been.

They do end up with a waterfall in the master bath, along with a jacuzzi, and off of that, in a small area Eliot had intended to use for ammo storage, there is a hot tub and a small sauna. Parker talks them all into taking a class in massage therapy, and her private room is set up as a small massage area, where she plays soft music and burns incense and does all of her solo workout stuff, but also where she has a fold out massage table and a variety of oils.

Things don’t stop happening while they work on the bunker.

They work two cons, one of which leaves Eliot with several broken bones in his left hand, and he has to hide that fact from Nate and Sophie until he can get back home with Alec and Parker and they can use their blood to heal his hand in about half an hour.

They hunt down three lone vampires, and Parker, puzzled, says that they all feel the same in her mind, as though they had been made by the same master, and then just set loose in the city without any kind of agenda, just to see what would happen to them. They suspect this is a trap for them, something one of the clan families is doing to try to draw out the Daywalker in their territory, and Alec digs through the Broadmoor’s personal documents and emails, but finds nothing in writing to confirm or deny that possibility. He complains long and bitterly about the fact that vampires don’t use their computers for anything but the most mundane things, which means he can only get bits and pieces from their private communications, none of which add up to a big master plan which he can then somehow work to foil.

Alec starts lessons with Hirota, and comes back from them looking both exhausted and smug. Eliot can tell that the idea of being the best at something physical, better, even, than Eliot, is good for his ego, and Eliot spars with Alec any time he wants to, because it’s good for Alec’s confidence to be able to beat Eliot. Hirota switches Eliot’s training to shorter bladed weapons, concentrating on a two-blade style that Eliot has to work hard to master, but which he is good at instinctively, and which is infinitely more satisfying to him than the lessons with the long sword had been. 

Parker hedges for a long time about lessons with Hirota, for reasons that she doesn’t seem to be able to articulate to them when they ask, and only decides to give in and go when it becomes clear that she’s falling behind Eliot and Alec in her fighting skills. Eliot isn’t sure if it’s practicality that drives her to it, or worry that she won’t be able to keep up with them, but eventually, she does go. Hirota works with her almost exclusively on throwing weapons and the stake, keeping up her blade skills, but, according to her, telling her that she has the best eye out of all of them for a killing strike with a stake, and that throwing weapons would be his sole focus with her if she weren’t also a vampire hunter. She comes home from her fourth or fifth lesson with him with a long mahogany box lined with velvet and fitted with slots for eight foot-long, razor sharp throwing knives so slender they are almost more like spikes than knives, and she reworks her leathers the same night so that she can carry all of them at once. She’s absolutely entranced with them, and Eliot and Alec rearrange part of the armory to set up a long, narrow practice range for her, complete with a fully rendered three dimensional man shaped target, and she spends hours in it, practicing with the throwing spikes.

Eliot had relayed all of Hirota’s advice to them both as soon as he’d gotten it, and Alec is still working on locating and hacking into the Vampire Council’s database. Lack of time is part of the problem, but part of it is that he can’t find any edges, his words, any overlap, anything that links to anything else that might lead to the site he’s looking for.

They go dancing at least once every two or three weeks, and when Sophie finds out, she’s so excited that there is no way to escape her plans to take them all shopping and outfit them for dance clubs. Nate is amused enough by this to actually come along with them, and it’s surreal to be out on the town with the entire team, shopping for club gear. Even Nate ends up with clothes, although all of his are suits designed for ballroom type dancing and other more formal affairs. 

Eliot ends up with leather pants, which he swears he will never wear until Sophie makes him try them on, instructing him to come out and model them without a shirt, and the sales girl helping them’s mouth falls open in shock, and both Parker and Alec stare at them, grasping at each other’s hands tightly, obviously without even realizing they’re doing it it, all out in public and in front of Nate and Sophie. Even Nate says, “I think you’d better buy them,” when Eliot tries to look to him for support. Eliot ends up with two pairs.

The whole experience, as surreal as it is, turns out to be unexpectedly fun, especially when they start on Parker’s wardrobe, and they eat out for lunch, laughing and talking about old cons, with bags and bags of clothing crammed under their table so there is nowhere to put their feet.

Parker and Sophie disappear at one point, and reappear with two black and pink bags that they won’t let anyone look into, and Sophie is clearly in heaven at her sudden ability to do girl things with Parker and have Parker actively participate and enjoy them, rather than just going along to humor Sophie.


	27. Chapter 27

The shopping trip happens on a Saturday, and since they all have new clothes and it’s been a few weeks, Parker doesn’t have any real trouble talking them into taking her out dancing. She dresses in a backless teal outfit that swirls around the very tops of her thighs, and demands that Eliot teach her how to do ‘the spanish dances’ he does, and so he spends a couple of hours with her on the mambo, tango, and salsa, explaining the steps and variations, and that there are a lot of others that are mix-ups of several different types of dances, but at that point it’s clear that with her superhuman grace and agility, she can follow him at almost anything he leads her into, so there’s not much point in teaching her any of the variations. Alec watches all of this at the same time that he’s working on his computer, and eventually decides that before they go dancing again next time, he wants lessons as well. Eliot is kind of glad to hear it, because while he doesn’t know very many regular clubs, he knows several Latin American dance bars in town, and while he’s grown comfortable enough with club style dancing, it’s never going to be his favorite.

Eliot wears his new leather pants, comfortable boots, and a sleeveless ribbed white shirt that is shinier than he would have picked for himself, but which both Sophie and Parker had been adamantly in favor of. He wears the same belt Parker had picked out for him on the first night they’d gone dancing, and ties his hair back.

Alec wears leather pants, too, his new as well, but patterned with what look like scales, and dark blue. He has a dark blue and silver tank top to match, along with black and silver boots, and he looks good enough in it that Eliot considers trying to convince his partners that they should all just stay in.

By this time, they’ve all come to accept that when they go out like this, they are going to be essentially weaponless. They load up the van with what they might be able to practically get to in case something does happen, but they have yet to get into trouble on these little breaks from the dangerous parts of their lives, and they’re necessary breaks. Between the team and being vampire hunters, they don’t get a lot of down time, and Eliot is familiar with what happens to soldiers who don’t get down time. He isn’t willing to watch that happen to either Alec or Parker.

 _Hot Mess_ isn’t the only club they’ve been to, but it’s the one they go to the most frequently, the one where a threesome that is clearly _together_ on the dance floor, consisting of two men, one of them black, and one woman, doesn’t cause any kind of attention whatsoever.

They park around the block, as they always do, and the guy at the door knows them, and undoes the thick velvet rope to let them in. A waiting girl with a page of sticky stars doesn’t even ask Parker, just sticks one on, arches a brow at Alec, who nods, and then gives Eliot the sad, hopeful look she always gives him when he smiles at her and just shakes his head.

“One day,” she says determinedly, and Eliot shrugs one shoulder, because he knows it’s never going to happen, but respects her tenacity.

They pause at the bar, all three of them going for beer instead of any of the harder stuff -- the harder stuff rarely happens any more, and most often all three of them walk out of the club sober -- and for the first time since the first time they’d come to this bar, Eliot sees Jairo, he of the sweet clover honey blood, sitting across the bar from them, deep in conversation with a pretty brunette. For a moment, a smile flits across his lips, remembering the dance and the taste of his blood, and then it slides away because Jairo looks different. He’s still young and gorgeous, still sex on a stick, but his skin is a paler mellow gold and too perfect for a real person, and Eliot’s sense of the room narrows and focuses and he can sense it, that dark flicker of hunger that means vampire.

Parker, her beer halfway to her lips beside him, clearly senses it too, and is staring at Jairo. Alec, not quite as keen on the sensing of vampires as Parker, isn’t looking at Jairo across the bar, but is looking at Parker, as though he senses _her_ sensing something.

Parker slowly puts down her beer and turns to look at Eliot.

Eliot’s brain is a bright buzz of anger and something almost a little like grief, and he feels Parker take his hand. Alec scans the room and finally focuses on Jairo, and moves to Eliot’s other side, one hand wrapped lightly around his wrist.

Jairo is a vampire.

He hadn’t been. Not before. Not when Eliot had danced with him and not when he’d tasted his blood, but sometime between now and then, sometime in the last few months, he had been turned. 

Some part of Eliot’s brain is noting facts. Jairo is a little leaner, a little more beautiful, and that flicker in Eliot’s brain marks him as a hungry vampire, but there is something distinctly different in the feel of him than in the feel of the solo night walkers that the three of them hunt down and execute. There is a sense of waitfulness there, a sense of something leashed.

“He’s in a clan family,” Parker murmurs almost soundlessly. “He’s not a rogue. Not a random killer. He lives by the rules.”

Something loosens in Eliot’s chest. He realizes it’s relief. He’s relieved that he isn’t going to have to kill Jairo. Not now anyway. Not when he believes what Parker senses about him, and has put some thought into all of the things that Hirota had told him over tea that day. There is a code. Some vampires don’t kill to live. Some vampires have laws and rules that they obey, and those vampires aren’t the ones that Eliot and his triumvirate hunt.

Jairo looks up at them, and catches Eliot’s gaze. Eliot isn’t sure what his face is showing, but Jairo’s expression brightens, so that he’s momentarily dazzling, and he grins at Eliot, and holds up a finger.

“What do I do?” Eliot asks, asking either of them, both of them, because he doesn’t know how to interact with a vampire that he isn’t planning on killing, and because in spite of the second set of link marks, the spiral ward that contains their power and keeps them from being a beacon to vampires, he isn’t sure that Jairo won’t be able to sense what they are up close. He doesn’t know how complete that protection is.

“He likes you, and you like him,” Alec says. “Neither of you want to hurt the other. This is as good a way to test whether or not he feels what you are as we’re likely to get. Parker and I are going to clear out, so that we’re not ramping up your power and revealing ourselves, in case he can sense it. But we won’t go far, and we’ll be watching. Just do your best to treat him the same as last time. Except for the part where you drank from him. I’m betting he’d notice it this time.”

Eliot nods, silent, taking slow, deep breaths to get his adrenaline under control. Vampires have heightened senses, too. He can’t let Jairo smell his fear or his anger.

Jairo breaks away from the girl he’s talking to and circles the bar, sidling up to Eliot, giving him a quick and appreciative look over as he does so. “Those pants do amazing things for you,” he says, and his grin is so guileless, and the tops of his cheeks flush just like before, and suddenly Eliot is calmer. Not completely calm, because some little part of him is still angry and grieving, but calmer.

“One of the women I work with discovered I was doing the club thing occasionally, and somehow trapped me into going shopping with her.” He deliberately tips back a swallow of his beer. “I was unanimously voted into these pants. I’m pretty sure I would have never been allowed to leave the store without them. Actually, I ended up with two pair. The other one is kind of a burgundy color. And shirts. So many shirts.”

Jairo laughs easily and Eliot watches with interest as he drinks from his own bottle. He’d always wondered if vampires could ingest anything but blood. “Well, I would have voted for the pants,” he says.

“You look good,” Eliot says, testing the waters. “Different.”

Jairo’s eyes crinkle at the corners a little as he grins. “Yeah, I was away for a while getting my life together, starting a new job and stuff. Things are good for me. Have they managed to get you up on one of the stages yet?”

Eliot laughs, and feels even a little calmer still. “Never,” he says emphatically. “Why do they even want me up there? I can’t dance by myself for shit. I’ve got to have a partner to sync up to, or I just sort of sway and flail.”

“A couple of the stages are big enough for two,” Jairo says, giving Eliot an appraising look. “I could probably arrange for you to have a partner.” He shrugs a little, and that charming blush shows itself again. “I’ve got connections here. I know you’ve got friends, but I’d be happy to volunteer to take your stage cherry.”

“I’ll think about it,” Eliot says, though he probably won’t. He’s busy watching Jairo and listening to him, and his senses are telling him that this is a hungry vampire, but this close to him, he also gets a feeling of calm he’s never felt from a vampire before, a sense of steely self-control. He’s never been so close to a vampire that wasn’t looking to kill and feed. There is a distinct difference in the way that they feel in his mind. Some of the grief starts to recede, although he’s still angry, though he can’t pinpoint exactly why. This is still Jairo. Different, now, and potentially dangerous in a way that he never had been before, but not a monster. Eliot can see it in his face.

“Buy you a beer?” Jairo asks, clinking his empty bottle against Eliot’s, which is apparently also empty.

“What’s new on the spreadsheet?” Eliot asks, and tries for a grin. It may not be his best effort ever, but Jairo smiles back and him.

“A pale ale, Bad Martha Brewing Company, called Vineyard Honey Ale. Just a little on the sweet side, good for dancing,” Jairo says, and arches both brows. “I know you like them darker, but I think you should give this one a try.”

“I’m not tied down to the darker brews,” Eliot says. “I just find more of them that I like. I’m willing to test drive it.”

Jairo waits until the bartender is facing them and waves to get his attention, shouting a little to make his order heard over the crowd noise.

While they’re waiting for the beers to arrive, Jairo says, “I hoped you’d come here again.”

“I’ve been here a few times,” Eliot says. “Just never saw you.”

“Yeah, I took a few months away to get some things straightened out in my life,” Jairo says. “My life was pretty messed up last time we met. Things are better now.”

Eliot feels a jolt of something he doesn’t know how to decipher. “Better how?” he finally asks.

“Better job, better place to live, better friends.” Jairo shrugs one shoulder. “Just better all around.”

“How did it happen?” Eliot asks, hoping for casual, not sure he makes it.

“I just sort of fell in with a group of people that were upwardly mobile and they liked me enough to take me along with them,” Jairo says with an easy smile. “It wasn’t long after I met you. Just a couple of weeks.”

“I didn’t know things were bad for you,” Eliot says, not sure what else to say.

Jairo’s grin dials down a notch, but doesn’t entirely fade. “I was working three jobs and spending all my downtime clubbing, and feeling like that was just as much of a job as the three I was working most of the time. It was just a habit I got into after college, when getting a job that my degree factored into didn’t happen right away. But I met a group of people that run a small company and they were looking for someone to handle their financials, and it just sort of… fell into place. I’m getting paid a good salary, doing what I went to school to do, flexible hours, paid time off, and just good people. People who will take care of you.”

 _Yeah_ , Eliot thinks. _I bet._ But he says, “Good. I’m glad you caught a break.”

Their beers arrive and they clink bottles. Eliot takes a long draw off of his, which is indeed a tiny bit sweet and hoppy, trying to think of something else to say to this kid, this vampire, where to slot him in his head, how to think of him now that he seems not only not evil, but actually happy, like becoming a vampire had cured all that had been wrong with his life.

“Good?” Jairo asks, expression hopeful.

“Very good,” Eliot says truthfully. “That hint of sweetness really brings out the rest of the flavor.”

Jairo grins and leans in a little closer to Eliot. “You smell good,” he says, eyelashes fluttering a little as he takes in Eliot’s scent.

The fine hairs on the back of Eliot’s neck prickle, and he’s pretty sure Jairo has picked him out of the crowd to be his next blood meal. Eliot can’t even bring himself to be offended; he’d done the same thing to Jairo the first time they’d met. He isn’t sure what to say to take himself off the menu. And with sex and blood as mixed up as they’d become between Parker, Alec, and himself over the last few months, part of him is more than willing to donate a little blood, just to make sure no one else in the club tonight has to.

But he doesn’t know what a taste of his Daywalker blood will do to Jairo, whether he’ll be able to figure out what Eliot is from drinking his blood, and…

And then Eliot has a flash of an idea. Maybe not the best idea of his life, but they need information on the Vampire Council, and Jairo is still a very new vampire. New enough that Eliot’s mind control powers might be strong enough to overcome Jairo’s abilities in that area.

It would have to be done with blood. The simpler way, the capture of his mind with Eliot’s gaze, is probably not strong enough. He reaches out for Parker’s mind, because hers is always the most receptive, and pushes images and intentions toward her.

He senses her concern and her curiosity as one single emotion tangled up together. She wants to know if it will work and is concerned that it won’t in equal measure. But after several seconds, during which she’s probably conveying the plan to Alec, she sends a burst of affirmation and caution through the link, along the the sense that she and Alec will stay close by, in case it goes wrong.

“So, do you want to dance?” Eliot asks, locking gazes with Jairo deliberately to get a feel for his mind and his defenses. He is surprisingly open to Eliot’s power; Eliot feels the jump of desire and excitement at Eliot’s suggestion, feels the edges of Jairo’s consciousness caught up in his gaze, can almost catch him like this alone, but doesn’t try. Better to do it with blood, more powerful that way, and better to do it in some private place.

“Still can’t get you on the stage?” Jairo asks, giving him a hopeful little look, and Eliot laughs, genuinely amused. There is some relief in that amusement as well. He still likes Jairo. If Alec and Parker were not in the picture, he would have taken this kid to bed in a hot second.

“No, but you can get me on the floor, and maybe someplace more private after we dance a while, if that’s something you had in mind,” Eliot says.

Jairo’s grin widens and his cheeks flare pink, and he takes Eliot’s hand almost shyly. “I’ll take that deal,” he says, his fingers, slightly cooler than human average, twine with Eliot’s. “Want me to see if I can cue up something special, or do you want to just go with what’s on tap?” he asks, referring to the music.

“This is good,” Eliot says. “I’ve had some time to brush up since last time I saw you. I’m less worried about embarrassing myself. Sometime, though, we should go to a place that caters to a more Latin American style, and see what we can really do.”

Jairo’s grin widens even further. “I’d love to,” he says, sounding like he really means it. “I know a place on Grand that has a live band and a good atmosphere where two guys can go without having to worry about standing out in the crowd.” By which he means the crowd is gay or mixed, like the one at _Hot Mess_ , and Eliot decides that if this works, if he can set up what he thinks he can set up between them, he’ll take Jairo up on it.

They dance, the first song with a heavy, grinding beat that encourages participants to dance up close and personal, and aside from Jairo’s body temperature being a little cooler than that of the normal human, it’s great. Jairo’s newly enhanced grace shows a little on the dance floor, though he’d already been lithe and graceful, so it’s not too obvious. The next song that comes on has a lighter backbeat, and they separate a little, bodies still synced up in rhythm, Eliot keeping up with Jairo, who is better, and seems to know it, and is deliberately keeping his movements toned down to something Eliot can follow and look good doing it. The next song is another rough, grinding beat, and Eliot is hard by the time it’s over, his hands on Jairo’s hips, so that they’re pressed together and he can feel Jairo’s answering hardness pressed against his own. Near the end of the song, Eliot dips down, sending out a warning and a reassurance to Alec and Parker, and kisses Jairo, putting all he’s got into it, and Jairo leans into it and kisses back with frantic enthusiasm.

They pull apart at the end of that song, and Jairo says, “Let’s get a couple of beers and find some private space,” and Eliot merely nods. Jairo apparently remembers the first beer he’d bought Eliot, the dark chocolate stout, and orders that, and orders himself the same, and then, flashing dark, glittering invitation at Eliot with his eyes, leads him through the Employees Only door and back into the office in which Eliot had first tasted Jairo’s blood.

Jairo drains half of his beer and then slides the bottle onto the edge of the desk. He watches Eliot drink, and then takes the beer from him and sets it beside his own, and says, “We still can’t have sex in here. My uncle would kill me. But….” He leaves the sentence open ended, and Eliot dips down and kisses him again, tasting the beer on his tongue and Jairo is the one that backs Eliot toward the couch this time, pushing him down and straddling his hips. He twists his hands in Eliot’s hair, pulling the tie out just like Alec and Parker always do, and buries his hands in the wealth of Eliot’s dark hair. He leans in as though to kiss it, but then just slides it along his lips, as though to feel the texture of it. “You smell so good,” he says, sighing, and bends down and kisses Eliot from above, his hands in Eliot’s hair pulling his head back and arching his neck. Eliot kisses him back, nipping a little at his lips, and Jairo grinds down against him, his back arching as they press against each other. 

Eliot doesn’t make a single move to resist when Jairo pulls Eliot’s head to the side with his hands in Eliot’s hair, baring his neck, and Jairo drags his lips along Eliot’s neck lightly. 

The sense of him, that hungry dark feel of a vampire, grows stronger in Eliot’s mind, but there is still that same sense of restraint about him, the feel that he’s in control of what he’s doing, and Eliot merely stiffens a little when he feels Jairo’s fangs pierce his neck, and Jairo groans, rocking his hips against Eliot, and Eliot enjoys the feel of it, the warm rush of pleasure for a few seconds, and then reaches out with his mind and captures Jairo’s mind with his, feeling the edges of it and surrounding it, trapping Jairo’s consciousness within the grasp of Eliot’s power. Jairo drinks, maybe a dozen mouthfuls in all, and Eliot is aware that Jairo has no idea Eliot has caught him with his power. Then, with a little sigh of regret, Jairo licks at Eliot’s neck, closing the wounds, and then sucks lightly at the skin there, leaving a light mark, something that will look like it’s not quite a hickey, and Jairo pulls back, his eyes wide and dark. “You taste like vanilla,” he says, sounding a little slurred, and Eliot tightens his grip on Jairo’s mind, and pulls from it what he can, images of vampires, the Broadmoor, Jairo’s clan family -- Caine -- and his maker, a gorgeous dark-eyed, dark skinned boy-man that looks like he can’t be older than eighteen, and looks if anything, more Spanish than Jairo does. He pulls free memories of Jairo’s feral days, three or four, in which he’d been consumed with blood lust, and the blood servants of his clan had kept him chained to the wall in an opulent room, taking turns feeding him, the vampires of the clan-family doing the same, until the blood lust had slowly faded and Jairo had regained control of his mind and his personality. He gets glimpses of lessons, lectures, explanations, and wishes he could see and hear more clearly, because this is obviously the part where they had taught Jairo the rules and Eliot wants to know those rules. 

He gets flashes of stronger vampires taking Jairo out, teaching him to hunt, helping him to hold his hunger in check, pulling him back from a girl with bright pink hair, Jairo’s fangs still dropped down, his hunger for her blood still burning in him, and the vampires with him redirecting that hunger, feeding and blunting the edges of that hunger with their own blood, weeks of this kind of hunting, until Jairo gains the strength of mind to draw back his hunger himself, the clarity of thought necessary to pick a victim that would be willing, and that he could heal and ease away the memory of the feeding from their minds.

Eliot also gets what is almost an overload of images and feelings of sex, both with vampires and with victims, and with a few of the blood servants, whom, Eliot understands, have the right to say no, and the intensity of the sex is familiar, Eliot feels the same intensity with Parker and Alec, and he finally gets, and fixes on, his mind intent and focused, the image of a computer screen, Eliot memorizes everything he can about the look of the page, the fragments of the web address he can only get glimpses of in Jairo’s mind, and then Jairo being absorbed in the history of the vampires, in their myths and legends, and in their laws and rules.

Eliot pulls back from Jairo slightly; Jairo’s eyes are glazed, and his mind is caught firmly in Eliot’s grasp. “How do I access that website?” Eliot asks him.

“Through the secure servers in the Vampire Council’s headquarters,” Jairo says dreamily. “You get a passcode.”

“What is your passcode?” Eliot asks.

Jairo rattles it off, a long series of letters and numbers that Eliot fixes in his memory fiercely and broadcasts to Alec and Parker at the same time.

“What is the web address?” he asks.

“You can’t access it through the internet,” Jairo sighs. “You have to be at one of the terminals in the clan families homes.”

“What is the weakest clan family that doesn’t live in the Broadmoor, the one that is the easiest to get through their security?” Eliot asks.

“Ipsilon,” Jairo says.

“Why are they the weakest?” Eliot asks.

“They’re stuck in the nineteenth century,” Jairo says, sounding a little disgusted. “Their security is outdated, and their blood servants are old. They haven’t kept up with the technology of the times.”

“What do you know about Daywalkers?” Eliot asks.

“That they hunt us,” Jairo says, brow furrowing. “Mostly we’re safe from them. They only hunt the rogues. In the histories, the Daywalkers and the Vampire Council had a pact.”

“What kind of a pact?” Eliot asks.

Jairo frowns. “I’m not sure. I don't think all the details of it never got transcribed into the database, or I can't remember them. But they used to work together. Sun Walkers,” he sighs. “They would let us drink their blood, and we would let them drink ours, and we would all grow stronger. Then something went wrong. Now they only live to hunt down those of us that don’t live by the laws. Sometimes they accidentally get one of us that do, because they can’t tell the difference anymore.”

“Can you pass an anonymous message to the Vampire Council? One that can’t be traced back to you?” Eliot asks.

Jairo seems to think about this for a while, and finally says, “Anything I send can be traced back to my clan family’s terminals, but not specifically to me.”

Not good enough, Eliot decides. Better to break into Ipsilon and send the message themselves.

“Are you happy, Jairo?” Eliot asks softly.

“Yes,” Jairo says. “I am happier than I have ever been. I have a job and a place to live and my clan family takes care of me. I feel free.”

“You won’t remember this conversation,” Eliot tells him. “You will remember biting me, and then kissing me again.” Eliot presses his will firmly around Jairo’s thrusting that order into his mind.

“I like kissing you,” Jairo says. “I like you.”

“I like you, too,” Eliot says, gently. “Kiss me.”

Jairo bends and presses his lips lightly to Eliot’s, and Eliot slowly eases his grip on Jairo’s mind even as he opens his mouth and kisses him back, tasting his own blood in Jairo’s mouth. He’s right. Eliot has a distinctly vanilla bouquet to his blood. Jairo’s hands tighten in Eliot’s hair again, and Eliot lets go of Jairo’s mind entirely.

Jairo pulls back, his eyes dark and soft. “I’d really like to go to bed with you,” he sighs, and presses a kiss to Eliot’s cheek.

Eliot rolls his hips up against Jairo, and says, “I am about half a minute away from having to google how to get come stains out of leather,” with a smile. “You have to get off of my lap.”

Jairo laughs brightly, dips down to kiss Eliot again lightly, and swings his leg out and over, so that they’re sitting next to each other on the couch. Jairo reaches out and snags their beers, passing one of them to Eliot.

“What is that cologne you’re wearing?” he asks, swinging one leg idly, and sips at his beer.

“I don’t wear cologne,” Eliot says truthfully. 

Jairo sighs. “You mean you smell this good naturally?”

Eliot laughs. “Apparently,” he says, and takes a drink of his own beer. “I’m here with friends. They’re going to notice I’m missing if I don’t show up back out in the bar soon.”

“We have to get out of here anyway,” Jairo says with a sigh, standing. “I am not allowed to have sex in this room, or keep anyone back here with me for longer than fifteen minutes. My uncle’s rules. I’m lucky he lets me use it at all.”

Eliot stands up and has to reach down the front of his leather pants and rearrange himself. Jairo watches him doing this with hungry eyes.

“Can I get your phone number?” Jairo asks. “So that maybe we can set up a date to hit up that Latin club I mentioned.”

Eliot gives him the number. “Text me so I have yours,” he says, and Jairo, typing with inhuman dexterity, immediately does so. Eliot feels his phone buzz in his pocket. 

“I’ve got a busy life,” he says seriously. “I work two jobs, not because I need the money, but because I’m a contractor, and I’m qualified to do both, and I like to keep busy. But being a contractor means I end up with random stretches of downtime between gigs. Can I call you the next time I end up with some time on my hands?”

Jairo’s cheeks flush charmingly. “I really hope you will,” he says. “You’re the first person I’ve ever brought back here twice, and the only person I’ve ever brought back here the first time I met them. I like you.”

Eliot brings out his really good smile, the one he uses to charm. “I like you, too. I’m looking forward to that Latin club. If it’s a few weeks before I call, I’m not blowing you off. I just want to make sure I have time between jobs to spend a couple of days doing whatever I want.” He lets the innuendo out without meaning to, startled by it, and then realizes he means it. 

He’s going to have to talk to Parker and Alec about this kid.

“Okay,” Jairo says, with a shy smile, and drains the remainder of his beer. “Come on, before my uncle comes in and tries to intimidate you. He forgets that I’m twenty-five sometimes.”

Eliot laughs. “Oh, God, don’t tell me you’re twenty-five. I’m robbing the cradle here.”


	28. Chapter 28

They exit the office and the Employees Only door, and head for the bar. Eliot automatically scans the room and finds Parker on one of the stages, a wild and exuberant crowd surrounding her, and Alec at the bar, leaning one elbow on it and watching Parker as he sips a beer. Eliot heads for Alec, who puts down his beer and grins at Jairo. 

“So you’re the one he keeps disappearing with,” he says, voice dripping with innuendo. He offers his hand. “Alec. I’m the guy that keeps the spreadsheet updated. What did you give him tonight?”

Jairo grins at Alec, flushing, and shakes his hand, and the two of them fall into a convoluted discussion about how they maintain their spreadsheets.

“I’m going to dance with Parker,” Eliot interrupts, when Parker is finally done with her turn on the stage, and Alec waves a hand and Jairo gives him a bright grin.

He grabs his beer and takes it to Parker, who snatches it from his hand and drains it in several long swallows. She gives him a smirky grin. “You’ve got a huge hard on for that kid,” she says, and he can sense her amusement along with her lack of concern, which sends a little ripple of relief cascading through his belly. “Get anything useful?”

“Lots, but nothing to talk about here. And yeah. I could spend a couple of days with him and enjoy it. But I don’t fuck around on my partners.” He means it, he does, but he doesn’t try to hide from her the fact that he’s serious about spending a couple of days with Jairo.

“You worry too much,” Parker says, and pats his cheek. “The three of us are… permanent. Nothing can break it. If you want to take the little vampire boy to bed for a few days, it doesn’t change anything between the three of us.”

Eliot isn’t sure what to say to that, so says nothing. He can feel that she’s absolutely serious, but he’s never slept around on a partner in his entire life. He’s not sure he’s ready to start doing it now. He wonders how he’d feel if Alec or Parker met someone they wanted to spend a day or two in bed with, actually digging down deep to search for possessiveness or jealousy, and curiously finds only the urge to make sure whomever it is is safe for them.

Parker throws him a sideways look, and pulls him out onto the dance floor. He follows, bringing his attention to bear on her and putting the rest of it out of his mind for now. 

Parker draws people to her like picnic lunches draw ants, and when a tall black woman with an impressive wave of cornrows moves to cut in and Parker winks at Eliot, Eliot backs off and lets it happen, dancing on his own for ten seconds or so, just watching Parker dance, pinballing between partners, before a tiny pixie of a girl in a gauzy wisp of a dress slides up to him, a question in her eyes. Those eyes are hazel and smoky, and her hair it tinted green on the ends, and Eliot steps in close to her and finds out that if he lets himself, he can pinball between partners just as readily as Parker can. He’s honestly surprised to find this out.

He’s good looking and well built, he knows that, and being dressed by his partners seems to up his attractiveness factor by an unknown degree, but he’s never considered himself to be the kind of guy that would get swarmed on the dance floor. He’s the muscle. It isn’t his job to look pretty, it’s his job to beat down anyone who needs beating down. He’s also at least ten years older than most of the people in this bar, though he doesn’t feel it.

At least some of Hiroka’s advice is proving to be right on the money. The more often Eliot drinks from their vampire kills, the younger he feels. His left knee, which has been dodgy for the past five years, no longer twinges at him. He’s looser, his body less tense, when he’s at rest. He hasn’t really looked at his face to see if it shows there, but he’s never actually looked his age, so maybe it won’t change what he sees in the mirror. But he can tell in other ways. Scars he’s had since his time in the Rangers are fading. Little aches and pains that he had learned to live with as he got older have disappeared.

He dances for a while longer, a little with Parker, a little with some random other people, a little while longer focused solely on Jairo, who joins him for a couple of songs, and then all four of them end up at the bar. Jairo orders for all of them, after Eliot introduces him to Parker, and they end up with something Eliot has had before and likes, and just talking. Alec and Jairo have computer skills and mad gaming in common, and Jairo and Parker actually leave their beers on the bar after two minutes of conversation, along with Jairo’s sleeveless shirt, and intercept one of the waitstaff who listens thoughtfully to what they have to say, nods in agreement, and makes her way over to the DJ’s set up. Three minutes later, Parker and Jairo are on one of the bigger stages together, demonstrating an amazingly sexually charged bout of a cross between a salsa and bellydancing, which has the whole crowd whistling and cheering, and Alec’s eyes widen with something hot and interested that Eliot can sense through the link. They both get water when they finish on the stage, gulping thirstily, and exchanging excited lists of the kind of dancing they know how to do, and Parker preens a little at Jairo’s admiration of her ability to salsa, considering that she admits that she’d only done it once with Eliot, a couple of hours before they’d left the bunker.

Eliot is weirdly pleased to see the three of them hitting it off, until Parker and Alec return to the dance floor, and Jairo turns to him, his expression a little taut, and says, “You’re together, aren’t you? I mean, together, together, not just friends you come clubbing with.”

Eliot eases in closes to Jairo, keeping his body language languid, and admits, “Yeah, we’re together. And no, I don’t usually fuck around. But I have permission to spend a couple of days doing whatever I like with you, and I trust them not to have a problem with it if they say they don’t have a problem with it. Not only that, but it turns out that they both like you. I thought Alec was going to have an aneurism watching you dance with Parker. And Parker let you touch her, which, for Parker, is a big deal. So, the only thing that has changed is that you’ve gone from someone I potentially want to pin down and have my way with to someone all three of us might want to kidnap for a weekend or so.”

Jairo’s eyes are very wide. “Oh,” he says, the tops of his cheeks pinkening.

“No pressure,” Eliot says. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do with anyone in any combination, including with me by myself. They merely noticed my interest in you, which made them interested in knowing what it was that interested me, and found out that maybe they might be interested, too. No pressure, and no promises. We haven’t talked it out that far yet. I haven’t asked either of them about it specifically. I just know them, and I can tell when they’re interested.”

Jairo sips at his beer. “Does this happen a lot?” he asks a little warily.

“This is the first time this has ever happened,” Eliot says.

“Oh,” Jairo says, flushing again, and then smiling a little. “I’ll think about it.”

“Just don’t _worry_ about it,” Eliot says. “The three of us are rock solid. Nobody else is ever going to be in a position to cause a breakdown in our relationship. So if you want the occasional fling with me, that can be arranged without any kind of fall out. And if you want to crawl into bed with all three of us, we’d have to talk about it -- because I haven’t asked them yet, I just have a good sense of what would work for them -- you could probably do that, too. But you don’t have to do anything. If the limit of our relationship is dancing and making out in back rooms, that is okay with me, too. You’re leaving me a little hard up here, but it’s not like I’m going home alone.”

Jairo continues to flush, but he grins again. “Okay, I won’t worry about it. I’m pretty sure about you, and at least… maybe intrigued is the best word, by the idea of all three of you, but I’m also okay if we end up only dancing and making out in back rooms. Maybe a little less okay with it than you, since I’m not going home with _them_ , but I’ve got friends with benefits I can call on if it works out that way.”

“It’s good to know you’ve got an outlet,” Eliot says. “I was feeling a little guilty.”

Jairo shrugs. “I could pick up almost anyone I wanted here,” he says matter-of-factly. “I just don’t generally do it. Club hookups started to be more trouble than they were worth around the time I turned twenty-two.”

“I was a little older, but I was in the military, which limits your options to bar hookups or taking care of it yourself, so I stuck with bar hookups a little longer,” Eliot says.

“What do you do, exactly?” Jairo asks.

“I’m the security specialist for a private firm, and I do some moonlighting on my own time,” he says, which is vague and not quite truthful, but is at least not actually really a lie.

“So you beat people up for a living?” Jairo asks, looking serious. “Or do you give the orders to have people beat up.”

“My job is hands on,” Eliot says. “When fighting happens, I’m the one doing it. Is that a problem?”

“No,” Jairo says. “That’s hot.”

Eliot laughs. “You’re too young for me,” he says, half-seriously, but still amused.

“I can’t be much younger than Alec,” Jairo says.

“True,” Eliot agrees. “He’s got a couple of years on you.”

Jairo waves a hand, as though dismissing those two years.

They close the bar down, the four of them alternating between talking and dancing, and leave together, huddled together outside for several minutes while Jairo gets phone numbers from Alec and Parker. He texts them both immediately, so they’ll have his number as well, and then a dark luxury car pulls up to the curb, and Jairo says, “This is my ride. Call me when you want to dance,” he says, grinning. He ducks into the car, giving them a little wave.

Alec, Parker, and Eliot walk around the block to the van, not talking, and climb inside.


	29. Chapter 29

“Do you think his blood still tastes like fresh grass and clover honey?” Parker asks Eliot.

“I don’t know,” Eliot says, but he wants to find out.

Alec, reading his mind or just his face, says, “He’d like to try it again and find out.” He sounds just as easy about it as Parker had, and the sense of him is just as unworried.

“Speaking of which,” Eliot says, and tells them everything he’d found out, especially the part about how the vampires used to drink Daywalker blood and vice versa, a cooperative arrangement, and then about why Alec hasn’t been able to hack into the Vampire Council’s database.

“I should have figured that out by the way their intranet is set up,” Alec says finally, as he swings the van into the private tunnel that leads down to the bunker. “I could probably crack it if I could get couple of things hooked up to any of the clan families terminals without having to be on site to do it, but we’d have to break into at least one of the clan families lairs to hook the equipment up to the terminal. I’ll do some research on Ipsilon and their security, but I’m betting the kid is right. He’s not in my league on a computer, but he’s probably light years ahead of most of the vampires older than he is.” He parks the van and turns to look at Eliot. “That was dangerous. If he were older…”

Eliot nods. “I was counting on the fact that he’s just a vampire baby, but even so, it was easier than I thought it would be. I think my mind control abilities are getting better. I know I’m in physically better shape than I have been in years. Hirota was right about drinking vampire blood.”

“And we’re drinking from the dregs,” Parker says. “If Sun Walkers and Night Walkers used to exchange blood on a regular basis, I’m betting it was from the more powerful of the Night Walkers, not the ones that flee the reservation. What kind of message are you thinking of sending?” she asks, and yeah, that is the question.

“First we find out the laws,” Eliot says. “And the history, if we can. Then we can try to open a meaningful dialogue with the Vampire council.”

“So the first break in at Ipsilon is a stealth mission. We download what we need from the Vampire Council’s database and learn what we can from it. I set up a link so that I can access their terminals uplink to the Vamp Intranet. Which means no casualties in Ipsilon.” Hardison frowns. “We need to get in and get out without them ever knowing we were there.” He looks at Eliot. “Their security may be outdated, but they’re still vampires, man. How do you plan to do this?”

“I can do it,” Parker says cheerfully. “I mean, I’ll want to know all the specs and what to expect inside, but I’m pretty sure I can get in and out without them knowing about it. Ipsilon doesn’t lair in the Broadmoor, which I wouldn’t want to try, but a regular lair with outdated security. Assuming it’s not in a cave or too far underground, there will be vents and external access. Leave that part to me. Just get me the specs.”

“Of course, that’s only half the problem,” Eliot says. “We still don’t know anything about the old Daywalkers, the ones that apparently monitor the Daywalker database and give out only certain information to the other Daywalkers, so that according to all our available source material, it’s open season on any vampire, not just the ones that stray outside Vampire law.”

“The Vampire Histories might have information on that,” Alec says. “They probably go back generations, and should help us pinpoint where the breakdown in the pact between the vampires and the Daywalkers happened.”

“Then our main priority right now is getting you uplinked to a terminal,” Eliot says. They climb out of the van and unload their weapons, disarming the security and climbing through the pressurized double doors and into the living room.

“There is a leak somewhere in the Broadmoor,” Alec says, settling down onto the couch with a sigh and kicking his boots off. “There has to to be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to hack into the intranet. If I can hack into their intranet, then it stands to reason I should be able to access one of their terminals to access the Vampire Council’s database. But I can’t find anything but their intranet; I can’t find anything to hook into from there. And I’ve looked for it, man. Someone is smuggling information out of the the Broadmoor through a very narrow crack in their intranet infrastructure, which I was able to find and backtrail to the intranet itself, but I can’t find the source of the crack.”

“How hard have you tried?” Eliot asks, kicking off his own boots and shuffling in his socks into the kitchen to grab a bottle of juice from the fridge.

“I have spent upward of two hundred man hours on it,” Alec says, and Eliot turns, brows arched in surprise. “I know,” Alec says, and rubs his face.

“Forget about it then,” Eliot says. “Your man hours are too valuable to waste on something that is keeping you from focusing on other things. Concentrate on Ipsilon. We’ll make our own crack in their intranet. If it becomes important later, or we develop some kind of actual working relationships with the Council, we can let them know they have a leak. But for now, stop pouring your resources into what is essentially a black hole.”

“I hate a mystery,” Alec says grumpily, and Parker leans over the back of the couch and massages his shoulders. Alec’s grumbles turn into happy rumbles of pleasure.

Eliot, out of nowhere and without any forethought says, “I really want that kid.” Standing there in his socks with a half empty juice bottle in his hand, he hears the words sort of ringing through the room, echoing a little, because of the way the bunker is designed. After it’s out, he understands that he had said it because he has to acknowledge it out loud for it to be real to him, and to his partners. He has to admit to it, and let them decide what he’s allowed to do about it.

“Even though he’s a vampire?” Parker asks curiously. She hasn’t stopped rubbing Alec’s shoulders. She doesn’t look bothered in the slightest.

Eliot waves his juice. “It doesn’t matter that he’s a vampire now. I thought it would, that he would be different, but he’s still himself. Just a happier version of himself. Not a psycho killer. I got a good long look at how the ones that go by the laws train their new vampires. They’re good at it. My guess is, the ones that we kill were never suited to be vampires to begin with. Jairo is still Jairo. His personality is still intact. He wasn’t a killer before, and he isn’t a killer now.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that he’s technically dead now?” Alec asks, glancing up from beneath his brows.

“Aside from his heart, the organs I’m concerned with seem to be in full working order,” Eliot says dryly.

Alec chuckles. “Yeah, I noticed that while we were dancing,” he says, also seeming supremely unbothered. “I like him.”

“He’s a hottie,” Parker says. “I like him, too.”

“Is that… what is that? Permission?” Eliot asks, because he feels like he has to ask, because even though he can feel their twinned lack of concern, he still wants some kind of verbal affirmation that everybody is okay with it.

“If you need permission,” Alec says, smirking a little. “And if he’s interested, you can bring him home and we can see how he reacts to Parker’s toy closet.”

“That blush,” Parker says, with a little croon in her voice.

Eliot huffs out a little laugh and finishes his juice.

Parker, almost, but-not-quite casually says, “I still haven’t seen Alec fuck you, Eliot.”

It’s true. Eliot keeps waiting for Alec to ask, not wanting to push, but Alec never does. “That would be entirely up to Alec,” Eliot says seriously. “I’m game on, but in no hurry. If he wants to wait for something, whatever it is, I can wait.”

Alec’s chin has dropped to his chest. Parker is still rubbing his shoulders. For a few seconds, Eliot thinks he’s fallen asleep, and the whole conversation has been pointless.

Then he says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m twice the size of that little red dildo you use on him that he likes so much.”

“I can walk you through it,” Eliot says, and not for the first time. “Parker’s dildo is for play. You’re not too big for me to handle. You might have to go slow, because it’s been a while, but I can take it.”

“I don’t want for you to just take it,” Alec says, looking up to meet Eliot’s gaze. “I want for you to want it. I want for it to be good for you.” He cocks his head a little bit, but there’s something in the sense of him doesn’t quite mesh with what he’s saying. “I’m half afraid I’ll manage to get halfway in and not be able to keep from coming in you.” That part it true. Alec’s eyes are glittering now. “I want you bad, man. But I don’t want to fuck it up the first time.” That is also true.

So what is it about the first part that isn’t true? Parker meets and holds his eyes over Alec’s head for a long moment, projecting an image of her mounting him and shoving in all at once, making Eliot howl with surprised pleasure that definitely echoes with notes of pain.

Eliot gets it.

Eliot’s belly tightens with low heat. “It won’t be a fuck up. If you’re that worried about it, one of us can get you off, play around until you’re hard again, and do it then, when you’ve got some staying power built up.” He pauses. “And you can throw me a hard fuck, Alec. You don’t have to go slow if that isn’t what you want. I can take it hard and fast.”

“I don’t want. To. Hurt you,” Alec manages through gritted teeth, but it isn’t true. It’s mostly true. It’s true in the broadest sense. But in this one little sense, it’s not quite true. Alec wants it rough. Rough enough that he’s afraid of what he wants.

“Alec, I was in the military. I was on the receiving end of hard, dry fucks more times than I can count. Use lubricant, and I can take whatever you want to give.”

Alec looks up, like he’s trying to read the truth of that statement in Eliot’s face, even though he has to feel through the link that it’s true. He looks like he’s really considering it for a long moment, and then he just shakes his head. “Not tonight,” he says.

Eliot’s body twinges with disappointment, but he’s not going to push Alec into anything he’s uncomfortable with. “I’m at your convenience,” he says, though, so Alec knows the invitation is there and open whenever he decides he wants to act on it.

Alec looks like he’s going to say something for a moment, his eyes still glittering dark and hungry as he looks at Eliot, and then he shakes his head.

Parker kisses the top of Alec’s head. “I’m tired,” she says. “I’m going to bed. Who’s coming?”

Alec stands up, and Eliot throws his juice bottle away, and they all three drag their feet all the way into the big bedroom. They strip carelessly out of their club gear and climb naked into the monstrous bed Alec had had custom made for them. Parker rolls over onto her side and kisses Alec lightly, and Eliot nudges at his shoulder until Alec rolls over onto his back so that Eliot can kiss him, too. Alec’s kisses are about the same as usual, so Eliot doesn’t think he’s too upset about anything. Then Eliot kisses Parker over the top of Alec, and they all three settle in.


	30. Chapter 30

Some time in the middle of the night, he becomes aware that he’s alone in bed, and wakes up enough to note that the rest of the bed it still warm. He doesn’t think much about it. If Alec can’t sleep, he gets up and works on his computers, and Parker has been known to get up and keep him company. He lets himself sink back down into sleep, knowing that he’ll probably wake up again when they climb back into bed, and not worried about it.

Some time later, he wakes, sensing Alec prodding gently at his mind, as though just to see how deeply asleep Eliot is, like he doesn’t want to wake him if he’s really out.

Eliot opens his eyes and blinks up at Alec, smiling a little in welcome. Parker is with him, sitting about halfway down the bed, her expression warm and curious, the feel of her a little excited. Alec looks more solemn, feels a little uncertain in Eliot’s sense of him. 

“Can I tie you down, or is that something only Parker can do?” Alec asks, nerves thrumming a little, both through his voice and through the link.

“You can do whatever you want with me,” Eliot says, heat sparking in his belly. “I need a drink and maybe a minute or two to wake up all the way, but yeah, Alec. You can tie me down.”

“What if I want…” Alec says, and pauses, flickering a glance down at Parker as though for reassurance, and then repeats, “What if I want to just fuck you. What if I want to tie you down and lube up just enough to avoid injuries, and just fuck you like that, Eliot.”

“This is what you’ve been worrying about?” Eliot asks, and curls his hand around one of Alec’s, which are resting loosely in his naked lap. Alec is hard already, the head of his cock straining up toward his navel. He must have gone to Parker to get up the nerve to ask, to see if she thought Eliot would be game.

“I want.” Alec clenches his jaw, a muscle jumping there for a moment. “I want you helpless, and I want to do whatever I want to you. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want, but I want…”

“A rough ride,” Eliot finishes for him, and smiles a little. “I told you, I can take it.”

“Yeah, but do you _want_ it?” Alec asks. “There’s a difference in being able to take it and wanting it like that.”

“I want you,” Eliot says. “And I like it a lot of different ways. That’s one of them. If that’s what you need, I’m I’m on board, man. Maybe not every time, but mostly yeah, and definitely if you feel like you need it like that.”

“I don’t want this to be something you do for me just because I want it like that,” Alec says gruffly. 

“I’m flexible,” Eliot says, and strokes a hand down Alec’s tense thigh. “I can take it rough, and I like it that way, as long as it’s not that way every time. I like some variety. But if you’ve got a hard on for giving me a hard ride, I’m down with that. You could have had that any time you’ve wanted it in the last few months. You can’t hurt me more than I like, Alec. You would know it in the link, you’d be able to tell.”

Alec’s eyes widen for a second, and then relief spills out onto his face and into his body language, and he says, “Yeah, of course. I didn’t think about that. It just didn’t occur to me.”

“The links are still new enough not to automatically factor in when you’re thinking about fulfilling fantasies,” Parker says a little wryly. “I didn’t think about it either. I was just pretty sure you were up for it.” Parker gets up off the bed and disappears from the room for a couple of minutes. She comes back with a bottle of juice, already opened, and hands it to Eliot, who drinks deeply, getting the fuzzy sleep taste out of his mouth and moistening his throat. Alec reaches out and takes the bottle out of his hand and slides it onto the bedside table. Eliot lets it go without objection, and then Alec is kissing him hard, a demanding, commanding kind of kiss, and Eliot opens his mouth and lets him do it, not trying to keep up, just cooperating, letting his lips and tongue be soft and pliant for Alec. One of Alec’s fangs knicks his lip, and Eliot goes a little taut, warmth coiling in his belly as Alec sucks at the wound for a long moment. 

It’s the first time Alec has used his fangs during sex with either of them.

He licks it closed after only a few seconds, but it’s enough to send jolts of pleasure crackling down Eliot’s spine to coil between his hipbones.

“How do you want me?” he asks roughly, and Alec doesn’t answer, but rolls him over onto his belly in the middle of the bed. The wrist cuffs he slides around Eliot’s wrists are not the easy escape ones, with the buttons. They’d graduated past those a little while ago. These have buckles, and Parker had had them custom made to fit snugly but not uncomfortably around any of their wrists, though they haven’t actually ever used them on Parker yet.

“Get your knees up under you,” Alec orders, and Eliot obeys, feeling the urgency sliding off of Alec in waves and more than willing to cooperate with anything that makes Alec feel like that in Eliot’s senses, like he’s desperate and full of want, something he’s been holding back for long enough that the idea of getting to have it is making Alec vibrate with anticipation and nerves.

Eliot feels the cuff close above his right knee, and does his best not to tense or resist in any way that Alec can feel, although being tied down this hard, tied all the way down so that he really _is_ helpless, is something Parker had had to work him up to. He likes it, and given a little bit of time to adjust, even likes giving up that degree of control, but he hadn’t taken to it like Alec had that first time, without reservation or fear. The cuff closes above his left knee, and Alec lets out a harsh breath, something that eases most of the tension out of Eliot just because he can feel the degree of desire Alec feels at having him this way. Alec strokes a hand along the curve of his ass, as though just to feel the tautness of Eliot’s muscle there, and the heat in Eliot’s belly spreads out, still crackling and rolling there, but spinning out to take in the rest of his body as well, so that his cock jerks and his balls tighten and he feels want prickle across the canvas of his exposed skin.

Alec wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest when he’d said he just wanted to lube him up just enough to avoid injuries and then fuck him. It’s Parker, who actually lubes him up, her small fingers slipping in easily, bumping across his prostate a couple of times, and then barely working him open, just enough to push more lube into him really, not enough to loosen him up, just enough to make him nice and wet.

Eliot really has had his share of dry, hard fucks, and he’s not worried, is actually a little electrified at the idea of Alec pushing into him with so little preparation. He wonders if Alec can feel that through the link marks; he isn’t sure because he can feel Alec’s urgency like roughly, arcing currents of electricity, and he’s not sure Alec can feel anything beyond his own need at this point. Which is okay. Eliot really can take it, really does want it, and he feels himself relaxing against the restraints, his back dipping, his ass tipped up, waiting, on offer. Alec grasps Eliot’s ass cheeks in both hands and pulls him open, and Eliot feels a flutter of erotic humiliation zing through him at the idea of Alec looking at him, slick and exposed, and Alec makes a low noise, something that comes from deep in his chest and sounds like it has to claw its way out of his throat.

Eliot shudders and sinks down onto his elbows, putting it all out there, making the offer as obvious as he can, and he feels the slick head of Alec’s cock press against his asshole, sliding for a moment, and Eliot remembers abruptly that Alec has never done this before, which sends a jolt of pure want crackling up his spine and into the base of his brain, and then Alec is lined up and pressing, and he’s big, and Eliot isn’t stretched, and the burn rips through him as Alec presses inside, and he isn’t gentle, though he isn’t really rough either, he’s just insistent, his want a staticky burst of white noise through the link. Eliot growls out a little sound of pain, and Alec’s want spikes and he shoves in harder until he’s buried balls deep in Eliot’s ass, and his hands are clamped around Eliot’s hips like vices. 

Eliot takes a deep, shuddering breath, waiting, and Alec groans and pulls back, fast enough that it still burns, even with all the lube, and slams back inside with a snap of his hips. Eliot lets out a little cry, but his body is aching for it, the stretch and the burn something he hasn’t had for years and hadn’t even realized he’d missed, the roughness of the act grinding through his groin, and then Alec is really fucking him, without pausing, without any kind of finesse, without bothering with Eliot’s prostate, which Alec probably doesn’t know how to aim to hit anyway, and it’s still so good. Eliot flexes within the restraints, and Alec groans like the idea of having Eliot helpless beneath him is almost more than he can take.

He holds out, though, and that more than anything tells Eliot that Alec has been wanting this and not taking it for a long time. He pounds into Eliot for long, hot, straining minutes, like he thinks he’s never going to get another chance at it, keeps going even after Eliot can feel the big muscles is Alec’s thighs shuddering and clenching, and Eliot lets himself revel in it, both in the way it feels, the use and abuse, rough and sweet all at once, and at the way he can feel Alec caught up in the grips of it, mesmerized as surely as if Eliot had caught him with his mind, long rough strokes, hard and fast, Alec pounding into him like he’s drinking Eliot in like a glass of cool water when you’re half-dead from thirst.

Eliot is aching to come, his balls hard, and tight and drawn up close to his body, his cock a long, hard length of pulsing need, and he’s letting himself make the kind of noises his almost never makes, open throated cries and taut little whining noises, and Alec is feeding on them, letting them spur him on, and Eliot thinks he might actually do something he’s never done before, that he might actually be on the verge of begging Alec to touch his cock, to let him come, when Alec says, “Parker!”

Parker’s hand wraps around Eliot’s cock, her grip tight and familiar and knowing exactly what to do, and Eliot shouts in pleasure, and then Alec’s fangs plunge into the back of his shoulder, a brief bright flare of pain, and then that rush of warmth, and Eliot shudders all over, his body going hard and flexing and tight, and he feels himself spurting over Parker’s fingers even as he feels Alec jerking into him, spilling hotly inside him as he swallows Eliot’s blood, and it must be as good for Alec as it is for Parker and Eliot, because he’s growling with his fangs sunk into Eliot’s flesh, and the pleasure of Eliot’s orgasm is a long, frantic and dizzy slide, pulled between Alec’s cock and Parker’s hand and Alec’s fangs.

When Alec tugs his fangs free and licks the wounds closed, Eliot is still shuddering with it, Parker’s hand is merciless, dragging him through the aftershocks, and Eliot is aching and raw, sore and he feels so damned good. Alec pulls his cock free of Eliot gently, and then his hands are on the buckles of the cuffs. In a minute, Eliot is completely free, and between Alec and Parker, they flip him over onto his back, where he lands in the wet spot and can’t bring himself to care. Alec leans down and kisses him, not quite so hard and demanding as the first time, this time possessive and satisfied. Eliot merely pants hotly into the kiss, trying to get his breath back and wondering if he can feel his toes.

“Okay?” Alec asks, but his voice is a low, smug purr of sound, and Eliot rolls his eyes at him. Alec grins, and Parker laughs.

“I can’t feel my toes,” Eliot admits, which just makes Alec look more smug and Parker laugh again. A few minutes pass in silence, and Eliot finally looks at Alec and asks,” Why didn’t you think you could just ask?”

Alec closes his eyes for a long moment and sighs a little. “You’re kind of toppy, you know,” he says. “Not just in bed, but in lots of things. I had what amounted to a rape fantasy about you. Lots of people, especially toppy ones, don’t handle those kinds of things well.”

“Parker has been tying me down and fucking me for weeks,” Eliot says.

“But that’s just playin’,” Alec says, his gaze solemn. “You let her because it gets her off, and it gets you off, and she’s sometimes a little rough with you, but she doesn’t do what I wanted to do.” He gives Eliot a little half-smile. “I just wasn’t sure it would be okay, and I didn’t want to mess anything up. And. I’m not really that toppy. At least, not with men, I guess. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to fuck you sometimes, but if I had to make a choice one way or the other, I’d take it the other way around. It wasn’t that I was never going to tell you; it was that I wanted to be pretty sure it would be okay before I tried it out.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I was flexible,” Eliot says. “I like lots of things, and the things I don’t like, I’ll be sure to let you know. And the things I don’t know if I’ll like, I’m always up for experimenting with. Don’t worry about things being okay about something you want. If you want it, ask for it, and we’ll decide together if it’s okay.”

Alec gives him a solemn nod. “It’s a deal.”

Parker says, “I’m pretty sure this is going to be okay with everyone, but I was more or less waiting until we all settled down and got the kinks ironed out before I mentioned it, but I’m hoping for some double penetration at some point.”

They both turn to look at her. Eliot is spent, but he still feels heat roll over in his belly.

“Both in front, or front and back?” Alec asks. His voice is a little husky. Eliot doesn’t blame him.

“Front and back,” she says, without any sign of embarrassment. “Only I’ve never taken it in the ass before, so you really would have to go slow for me.”

“Some women don’t like anal at all, Parker,” Alec says. “And when I say don’t like, I mean actively hate. Would you want to try it just with the anal first, give it a test drive?”

She grins, looking cheerful. “No. I want both at the same time. It’s been on top of my fantasy list for years. Just no pair of guys I trusted enough. And unlike you, Alec, I have used my toys. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be okay with it.”

“Have you thought about what kind of position you want to be in?” Eliot asks. “Because that can make all the difference with double penetration.”

She smirks a little, but shrugs. “I’ve imagined all sorts of ways. But I’ve never done it, so if you’ve got the experience, I’ll let you decide.”

“For a woman, sitting up, back straight, is the best.” Eliot looks at her for a long moment. “Ideally, with your arms up above your head and out of the way.”

She glances at him sideways. “So tied up, you mean,” she says, her tone neutral.

“Not if you’re going to hate it,” Eliot says. “It’s just easier for you to keep you arms up that way if you don’t have to think about keeping them up there.”

She nods firmly. “I’ll make sure to get an eyebolt into the ceiling within the next few days.”

“I could get an eyebolt into the ceiling within the next few minutes,” Alec says.

Parker laughs, and Eliot chuckles and shakes his head. “I hate to break it to you, kid, but I’m not twenty-six anymore. I don’t bounce back quite that fast these days.”

“I have an idea about that, actually,” Parker says. “I’m neither lobbying for an immediate demonstration of the idea or an immediate eyebolt, but I read something in Selena’s journal the other day about how vampires keep going when they have orgies.”

“Really?” Alec says. “I’ll have to get caught up on Selena’s journal. I’ve had some other stuff going on.”

“You have to at least tell us,” Eliot says. “You can’t just tell us you can give us instant hard ons and then not tell us how.”

Parker smirks. “Yes, I can.” She gives him a wicked look. “It’ll be more fun if you’re not expecting it.”

“I doubt I’ll need it by the time you get an eyebolt installed,” Eliot says grumpily. “The idea of pinning you between the two of us will be enough all on it’s own to get me ready.”

“Then you’ll just have to wait and see the next time you need a breather,” Parker says, still looking wicked, delighted with her secret. “And, Alec, you’re not allowed to read ahead. You can’t keep a secret.”

Alec looks injured.

Eliot tries not to sulk.

“Five minutes, man,” Alec tells him. “She hasn’t even gotten off tonight.”

“I got off watching the two of you,” Parker says. “I have hands.” But now she’s looking demure, an expression that is never sincere on Parker, and Alec and Eliot both know it.

“Are you saying you _don’t_ want to do this tonight?” Eliot asks, rolling over so that he can get a good look at her expression.

“I said I wasn’t lobbying for it,” she evades, and tries to look away. Eliot quite deliberately catches her with his eyes and for a moment her mind is open to him, and the twist of desire in her mind is enough to call up an answering twist of heat in his belly. “No fair!” she says indignantly, and he opens up his mind to her and gives her a fair imaginary picture of what it would look like, and she closes her mouth with a snap.

“Get the eyebolt and the drill,” Eliot says, and rolls off the side of the bed to open Parker’s toy closet, which Alec had designed to replace her trunk. Alec rolls off the other side of the bed and nearly sprints out of the room to get the tools.

Eliot digs out the manacles with the buttons on them, and the little vibrating daisy she sometimes clips to her clit.

“I’m not sure about being tied up,” Parker says, her voice low, as though it’s a confession she feels guilty about but has to make anyway.

Eliot had already guessed that, and shows her the button manacles. “It really isn’t about being tied up,” he tells her. “Though it can be, if you find out you like it that way. It’s about keeping your arms and hands out of the way so that Alec and I can get into a good position. But we can leave them down if it really bothers you.”

Parker looks like she’s considering it.

“It just lets us get as close to you as possible on both sides,” Eliot says. He palms a pair of nipple clamps, which he knows for a fact that she does like.

“If I pop out of the cuffs, it doesn’t necessarily mean I want to stop,” she says, finally. “It just means I don’t like the cuffs.”

“Understood,” Eliot says, and brings the stuff over to the bed.

Alec comes in and climbs up onto the bed, cordless drill in hand. He measures the middle of the bed by eye, and quickly drills a hole in the ceiling. It actually takes him less than two minutes to screw the eyebolt in. There’s a little concrete dust on the bed now, but Eliot has already come all over these sheets, so it hardly matters. Alec deposits the drill on the bedside table, and pulls Parker to him, kissing her hard enough that her head rocks back.

To be twenty-six again. Alec is already almost completely hard.

“Front or back?” Alec asks Eliot, who turns to look the question at Parker. Ideally, he’d choose front, just so that he could watch her face while they fuck her, but she is by no means stupid.

“Eliot in the back,” she says. “He has more experience that way.”

Alec grins. “No arguments here,” he says. “I want to watch your face.”

Eliot wonders if they should line the walls with mirrors. “Did you clean up?” he asks Alec, who nods easily, not looking offended at being asked.

Eliot stands up on the bed and strings the cuffs up through the eyebolt. “Stretch up, Parker, let me see how long these need to be.”

Parker scoots into the middle of the bed, biting her lip a little, but stretches her hands up so that Eliot can tie them off at a good length.

He’s half hard now, and given half an hour, or maybe even less, will be fully hard, but be wants to know her vampire-orgy-party-trick, so he kneels down next to her, and says, “Okay, girl. Show me what you’ve got.”

She grins a little and leans over Eliot’s lap, mouth warm and tight around the head of his cock for a few seconds, tongue soft and swiping gently at the glans, and then he shouts in surprise and pain as her fangs pierce the head of his cock and would have jerked away, except she’d anticipated it, and has firm grip on his hips. The pain fades almost immediately, replaced by the familiar wave of warmth, but he can also look down and see her lips wrapped around his cock, which makes the wave of warm pleasure twist into something a lot more urgent and vital, and when she pulls off, tonguing the wounds in his cock closed, he’s hard as iron, throbbing a little with it, like she’d drawn all the blood in his body down to cock. She grins up at him, her fangs still peeking out. “Surprised?” she asks.

And he is surprised, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. He merely nods dumbly while Alec looks on with what looks like a mixture of sympathy for Eliot and being impressed with Parker. “No such thing as vampire erectile dysfunction disorder,” Alec says. “Jesus man, I’m not sure I could let her _bite_ my cock.”

“It was totally worth it,” Eliot says, and takes Parker by the arms and eases her upright. “I don’t think I’ve ever been harder in my life.” He hears the little trembling edge to his voice, and can’t force it down. “Let’s get you settled onto Alec so that I can get my cock into you before I just throw you down and shove it in.”

Parker looks at him with wide eyes, and he just lets himself look back, showing her that twist and grind of want in his eyes and knowing she can feel it through the link. 

“That is not a trick you should use unless you plan to get fucked directly thereafter,” he tells her, and lifts and turns her, so that she’s straddling Alec’s lap. Alec leans back and presses the length of his cock forward, and Parker makes a tiny, searingly hot noise as she slides onto him, her hips twisting downward even as Eliot lets go of her and lets her just fall onto the length of Alec’s cock. She moans, her back curving into a perfectly graceful arch, and Alec bends down and bites gently at one of her nipples. 

“Here, man,” Eliot says, and Alec’s eyes shift upward and see the nipple clamps. He takes them one handed and pulls his mouth off of Parker’s breast to twist the nipple into a sharp little peak. Eliot takes Parker’s right wrist and draws it slowly upward, clicking the cuff around it. She tenses a little, but Alec shifts his attention to her other nipple and she hisses in pleasure and doesn’t make any attempt to resist when Eliot raises her left wrist up and cuffs it above her head. She pauses then, looking up at her cuffed hands. She opens her mouth, and then Alec squeezes one of the clamps open and let’s the jaws of it close around a nipple. She jerks and gasps, and her hips rock down onto Alec, twisting sharply. Alec clenches his jaw, letting out a harsh little sound of pleasure, and then clamps the other nipple. Parker throws her head back, whining, her hips working, though she’s not quite riding Alec, doesn’t quite have the thighs working, she’s just feeling the stretch of her cunt around his cock and the fullness of it, teasing them both, not with malice, but just because Parker likes that edge of pleasure, likes to let it build up.

Eliot grabs the daisy, a little plastic nothing of a toy that Parker brings out sometimes when she rides one of them, tugs it open, and reaches down between Parker and Alec’s bodies, clipping it to her clit. He presses the middle of the flower and a low whine of vibration fills the room. Parker shouts, and this time her thighs bunch and she tugs herself up and drops herself back down onto Alec’s cock.

“Hold her hips,” Eliot tells Alec, just as Parker’s thighs bunch again, and she makes a little mewling sound of dismay. It’s one of the sexiest sounds he’s ever heard her make.

Eliot lubes up his fingers liberally and slides them along the cleft of her ass, slicking her up. She makes a breathy sound, still grinding down on Alec, and arches her back again. Her hands, bound above her, hang loose and easy in the cuffs. She’s not fighting them at all. Not yet, anyway. Eliot rubs a slick finger around her asshole, and she starts to pant a little. He wishes he could see her face. Alec is watching her, and looks mesmerized. He gives and experimental bit of pressure, and she opens for him relatively easily. As his finger slides into her, she moans throatily, and Eliot smiles, pleased. This will be easier with her than it had been with Alec, she’s used toys in her ass before and liked it. He strokes into her, and she rocks back a little, encouraging. As he pulls his finger back, she rocks her hips forward so that she’s riding Alec’s cock in tiny little increments. Alec’s jaw is tight, his whole body tense, but he dips down and tugs at the nipple clamps with his teeth, holding himself in check by taking advantage of his ability to drive Parker crazy. She keens out a long, soft noise of pleasure barely limned with pain -- the clamps aren’t the gentle kind, they’re the kind with little jaws, as Parker likes a little pain with her sex -- and Eliot takes advantage of her distraction to slide another well-lubed finger into her. She tenses, shudders once, and then relaxes again, whining softly, but without pain this time.

She grinds down against Alec, and this time he arches up into her at the same time, trapping the little buzzing flower clamped on her clit between them. She shrieks out a surprised cry and then shudders for real, and while she’s coming, Eliot works his fingers into her ass, tight and hot and he’s so ready to be inside her that he can barely stand the feel of her clenching around his fingers while he’s opening her up. Alec tugs at the other nipple clamp, keeping her mind on the pleasure. Eliot doesn’t know if Alec is just a natural at this or if he’s getting some of it from Eliot’s mind, and Eliot drizzles more lube onto his fingers and presses a third finger into her. 

She makes a brief, almost baffled noise of pain and he feels her clamp down around his fingers, stilling his hand. He keeps still, lets her get used to feeling opened up and invaded because she’s going to end up opening up a lot more than this, and being invaded by something substantially bigger than his fingers. Alec rocks his hips gently, and she moans, moving with him instinctively. Alec eases a hand down between them and presses his fingertips against the vibrating daisy, and she shrills out a little sound of pleasure and rocks her hips up to get more sensation from it. Eliot stretches his fingers wide inside her, pulls them back, and presses all three in at once, and she makes a soft sound, a kind of, “Ungh,” noise that leaves Eliot on fire from his balls all the way up his spine. She’s going to make that kind of noise when he shoves his cock into her, and idea of hearing it makes him break out in a sweat.

Alec does something, Eliot doesn’t see or feel what it is, but she moans and rocks forward. Eliot’s fingers slide almost all the way out of her, and he presses them back in, not gently this time, but firmly. She makes a harsh, choking noise, her whole body stilling for a long moment, and then she rocks back carefully onto Eliot’s fingers. Eliot holds his hand still and lets her rock forward onto Alec’s cock and then back onto Eliot’s fingers for a full minute. She makes low sounds, pleasure and effort all mixed up together, and then her hips snap forward hard twice, three times, and she comes again.

Eliot pulls his fingers free quickly but gently, and lubes up his cock, his hands shaking with want, and lines himself up with her hole, which gapes a little open, pink and a little swollen from his fingers inside her, and pushes in just as she goes loose and trembling from orgasm. She shrills out a little sound of pain and tries to pull away, and Eliot grasps her firmly by the hips. He and Alec shift around a little, her legs spread wide over the tops of theirs, so that they can both push inside all the way. Eliot hears leather creak, and glances up; her hands are wrapped around the straps of the cuffs, not trying to pull free or fumble for the buttons, so he ignores it. Alec shifts upward so that she’s not quite resting on his thighs anymore, and he and Eliot exchange a look.

“You start,” Eliot says, and it takes an amazing amount of willpower to do it. She is so tight it’s almost painful, if pain were the most debilitating pleasure ever, and he wants to ride into her desperately, but it will be better for her if Alec winds her up first, and Alec knows how to wind her up. He pulls back and thrusts into her cunt, and she twists her hips and thrusts back; the muscles of her asshole clench around Eliot at the movement and he can feel his fingers biting into the soft skin of her hips, but he can’t make himself loosen his hold on her. Alec fucks into her in quick, hard thrusts, which she struggles to match, but can’t quite move in time with, with Eliot’s grip on her hips. The moans catching in her throat are pleading sounds, and Eliot waits until they are high and helpless sounding, and then he waits for Alec to pull back, pulls back at the same time, and they both push into her together. Eliot can feel the hard thickness of Alec’s cock thrusting up against his through the thin flesh separating them. It feels amazing.

Parker screams, thrashing for a moment and trapped in between them, and then she whimpers, “Yes,” her voice wrecked, and they fuck her, Alec in her cunt and Eliot in her ass, and that sound, that little “ungh,” sound she makes every time Eliot slams into her makes his fangs drop, though he hadn’t had any intention of biting her, doesn’t bite her, just fucks her, long and rough, in perfect sync with Alec, until her whole body tightens and Alec makes a rough, helpless sound that Eliot knows means he’s close to the edge, and her neck goes loose, her head falling back onto Eliot’s shoulder as she bucks frantically through another orgasm, and then her neck is right there and Eliot doesn’t try to stop himself from sinking his fangs into her salty, sweaty skin. She moans, her hips bucking again, short, sharp little snaps of motion, and then Alec groans out his orgasm in a harsh expulsion of breath. Parker whines, still twisting gently between them, and Eliot holds her still, his grip on her like steel, and thrusts into her ass maybe another half dozen times before he can’t take any more, and he buries his cock in her and closes his eyes, flashes of bright white pleasure bursting behind his eyelids.

Eventually, Alec reaches up and clicks the buttons of the cuffs open, and Parker’s hands fall limply to her sides. She’s leaning all her weight back against Eliot, breathing in harsh, panting gasps. Eliot is the one that thinks to pluck the vibrating daisy off of her probably desperately oversensitive clit, and she goes almost dishrag limp when he does. Alec pulls free of her first, since she’s tipped back almost in Eliot’s lap, and he gently removes the nipple clamps, eliciting a sharp little gasp as each one comes free.

Eliot kisses her neck, and he is still deeply buried in her and can feel every twitch and quiver of her body as she comes down.

Eventually she drags herself upright and off of Eliot’s cock, and tumbles onto her side in the middle of the bed.

“Okay?” Eliot asks, because it’s not like Parker to be quiet after sex, especially after very good sex. She’s one of those people that is often so invigorated by good sex that she can’t go to sleep after, and has to go work out or something to come down from it.

“Sore,” she breathes out dreamily, and Eliot relaxes a little.

“Still at the top of your list?” Alec wants to know, easing down beside her and running a hand down her ribs and across her hip.

“Yeah,” she breathes languidly. “It was better than I thought, even. Even with the cuffs, and maybe.” She is silent for several long moments. “Maybe better with the cuffs.”

Alec and Eliot say nothing, because Parker like this sometimes tells them things, and they both recognize it and would never in a million years do anything that might derail it.

“Had a bad experience,” she says. “Had a guy that didn’t stop when I safeworded. I’ve been scared of the cuffs ever since. But.” She opens her eyes, which are dazed and soft looking. “But neither of you would ever do that, which is why I made sure the cuffs on the bed would be snug for any of us, custom made to exact measurements for all three of us. I want to want it like that again. It was so good, until it wasn’t. Just. Maybe a little more time.”

She blinks slowly up at them.

“As much time as you need,” Alec says, his voice tight. “Do I need to kill this guy for you?”

Alec has never killed a human being before, only vampires, but he sounds dead serious. Eliot feels an uneasy little thrill at it, combined with a warm knot behind his breastbone, because he’s sure Alec means it. That he’ll discard that last bit of his innocence for Parker if she needs him to, and he won’t regret it.

“No, he’s in jail,” Parker says, and slowly eases an elbow under her so that she’s half upright. “I planted pictures of child pornography on his computers and called in an anonymous tip. Child molesters don’t do well in jail.” She doesn’t sound quite as smug as she might normally, but she sounds satisfied with the situation, which is good enough for Eliot. If she’s content that the bastard is getting what he deserves, then he trusts her judgement.

“Plus, don’t forget the link marks,” Eliot says gently. “We can’t hurt or scare you without knowing it, Parker. And I’m willing to wait as long as it takes to make you feel safe, but I’ve spent some time with my own hand in the shower thinking about tying you down and going down on you until you are so sensitive you beg me to stop.”

Her mouth quirks into a little smile. “Really?” He can feel her considering the idea.

“Oh, yeah,” he tells her, keeping his mind open and easy for her to reach into and sort through. He even feels her doing it a little, the light brush of her power slipping through his thoughts. He doesn’t hide any of the other fantasies that involve tying her down either, leaves them all out on display for her to rifle through as she likes, and her smile widens a little.

“I had no idea you would be so creative,” she says, sounding serious and teasing at the same time. He can feel the way her mind eases as well, and she turns to Alec. “What about you?”

“I have no idea if you’re into this,” Alec says quietly. “But I’d like to spank you till your ass is bright pink, until it actually hurts you enough that you cry, and then fuck you.”

Eliot feels the sharp spike of combined fear/curiosity/lust jolt into Parker’s mind, and she blinks at Alec. “I don’t know if I’m into it,” she says. “I’ve never been spanked.” But she’s thinking about it now.

“You’ve spanked other people,” Eliot says; he’s seen glimpses of it in her mind during sex.

“Mostly paddled or strapped,” she says. “I have small hands, and before I was always careful not to show how strong the marks made me; it’s a lot harder to explain how you managed to bruise someone up with your bare hand, especially when you’re my size.”

“Do you want to do that to us?” Alec wants to know.

The jolt of lust is sharp and immediate, and all the answer that is needed.

But her voice is almost totally neutral when she says, “If you’re willing to give it a try, I’d like that. Have either of you ever been hit with anything?”

Eliot shakes his head, considering the idea, turned on by it just from her reaction to the idea, so that he knows he’ll let her try it on him, even though he has no idea if he’ll like it.

“Yeah,” Alec says. “I had a girlfriend who liked to spank. I like it. I think I’ll like it tied down even better.” Alec’s mind is wide open as he says it, and Eliot is a little surprised by the current of anticipation that Alec is feeling. He’d known Alec likes to be tied down. It’s obvious.

It’s different between the two of them, though. Eliot gets something different from it. It’s a voluntary surrender of control that does something in his mind and body, eases him down, relaxes him, makes him feel safe because it’s Parker -- and now Alec, too, now, he guesses -- and he trusts Parker absolutely.

Alec likes to fight the bondage. He likes to jerk and twist and… and almost… rage against it. It’s an odd juxtaposition, because with his strength, he could snap the leather, but he never does. He always holds back that last little bit of strength that would actually set him free. He wants the illusion of being helpless, and is willing to hold back his real strength to maintain that illusion.

“We could get some chains,” Eliot says, almost without thinking, and feels Alec react, just in his mind, nothing showing on his face, but the idea does it for him.

“I can do better than that,” Parker says, and sits up, so that all three of them are sitting cross-legged in a loose circle in middle of their gigantic bed. “I’ve got other equipment in storage. Stuff that was made for a more serious level of kink than what we’ve been doing.”

Eliot thinks about that. “I think I’m pretty comfortable with what we’re doing,” he admits. “I’m not sure one way or the other about anything more serious.”

“That’s kind of the beauty of a threesome,” Parker says, eyes bright and lucid again, voice light and perky. “Everybody tries anything they are interested in, and nobody has to go any further than they want. I’ve been pretty sure that Alec was more hardcore than you are for a while, Eliot. But kinky sex is weird in some ways.” Alec snorts, and Parker smacks him on his shoulder. “Other than just the fact that it’s kinky I mean,” she says. “The boundaries on it are fluid. Things that might seem like they’re too much for you might be just right for Alec, and the opposite is also true. There may be things that Alec wouldn’t want that you’d be just fine with. For example, Alec needs his nipples pierced more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.”

Alec jerks a little, startled, and then falls into the idea in his head in a way that surprises Eliot a little, falling into it so hard that his cock, which should be done for the night, twitches and starts to fill.

“While you would have no interest in having your own nipples pierced,” Parker continues, “but you will get a ton of enjoyment out of Alec’s piercings.”

They are all three silent for a long moment. “Am I going to need to expand your toy cabinet?” Alec asks finally, and Parker laughs and Eliot smirks. “No, you left a lot of empty space in it. I might have you install some more shelves and hooks, and at least one big drawer at the bottom, but I don’t have such a big collection that I can’t make do with the space I’ve got. I’ve just got some other things, other than chains I mean, that are designed to hold you down harder. Things I’m sure you can’t break if you decide you really want to put all your effort into fighting the bondage.” She gets a dreamy look in her eyes. “I lucked out. You are both open minded enough to let me try what I like, and you both have such different reactions to things that I can go with whatever suits my mood.”

“What about what we want to do to each other?” Alec asks, feeling a little hesitant, but as though he’s determined to ask anyway.

“I like to watch, and I can teach you most of what you need to know. There are some odds and ends I never picked up that I think you two might like to do together, but I can research a lot of that, and I have contacts in the community if I need a demonstration.” She gives Alec a wicked little smile. “If you think you want something you don’t know about, you can always ask.” She throws a glance at Eliot, her brows arched in question. “I’m assuming that anything either of you want to surprise the other with is something I’m allowed to keep to myself.”

“We trust your discretion,” Eliot says, but his head is swimming a little with vague and half-cocked ideas of things he might want, including things he wants to do, things he might like to have done, and things that he’s done before, though some of them not with either of them. “My experience with anything really kinky is pretty limited. Though I have to agree with Alec on the first thing on his list. I’d like to turn you over my knee.”

She smiles faintly. “We can try it,” she says easily. “Maybe the best thing about the link marks, at least as far as sex is concerned, is that there’s hardly any chance of messing it up. Anything one of us doesn’t like is going to be immediately obvious.” She looks at Alec and then at Eliot. “I’ll get my stuff out of storage tomorrow,” she says. “We can go as slow and easy as you want.”

Alec says, “About the nipple piercing.” And then shuts his mouth. His skin is too dark to show a blush, but Eliot can sort of sense it from him anyway.

“I’ve got a kit,” Parker says. “We can do it as soon as you want.” She pauses, looking at him for a long moment. “The kit isn’t in storage, Alec. I can do it right now if you want.”

Alec swallows visibly.

Incredibly, impossibly, Eliot feels his cock twitch against his thigh, most definitely interested, though not quite able to do anything about it yet.

“Normally, with our lives, I’d want to wait for some downtime to do it. They take a while to heal. But with blood healing, you can do it any time and we can heal you up in a matter of minutes,” Parker says seriously. Her attention on him is so incisive it feels almost feral. The piercings might be mostly for Alec’s sake, but it’s obvious that she’s at least as turned on by the idea of doing it to him as he is at having it done.

“It’s late,” Eliot says, a little half-heartedly. “Or early. Depending on how you look at it.” They both look at him, like they’re a little surprised at even such a mild objection. “I’m thinking about the rest of your stuff,” he tells Parker. “If it’s as good for him as you seem to think it’s going to be, waiting until you’ve got what you need to really pin him down might be a good idea.”

Alec lets out a little sigh, but he nods. “Not a bad idea,” he says.

Parker cocks her head a little, looking a little like she knows something they don’t and is deciding whether or not to tell them, and then she just nods.

“We need to get cleaned up,” is what she actually says, which is absolutely the truth, along with changing the bedsheets. “Besides, you might not like what I’ve got on hand,” Parker says. “We should do a little shopping around to see what you’ll like before we commit.”

The shower in the master bathroom is plenty roomy enough for three, a design they had all been in complete agreement on, and they clean up and change the sheets. By the time they get back into bed, it’s after five, but none of them have anything in particular they have to do that day, so if they sleep late, it won’t hurt anything.


	31. Chapter 31

The next day, Eliot spends mostly working out with his new weapons. Alec is on the computer, checking out Ipsilon, and Parker had disappeared, presumably to get the rest of her toys out of storage.

Eliot is making himself and Alec omelets when he hears Alec laugh a little maniacally from the living area. He smiles a little at it, but doesn’t stop what he’s doing because it’s easy to fuck up an omelet unless you pay attention to what you’re doing, and he figures Alec will come tell him if it’s important. He still hears the steady tapping of the keyboard, so whatever it is, Alec isn’t finished doing whatever it is he does that makes him a brilliant hacker.

Eliot plates the omelets and takes them out into the living area, sliding one onto Alec’s desk in a relatively clear spot. Alec picks up his fork and begins to eat without looking away from the screen, still tapping away at the keyboard one handed.

Alec is about halfway through his omelet, and talks with his mouth full, when he says, “We have a lucky window of opportunity coming up.”

“Oh?” Eliot asks, and watches with fascination as Alec continues to eat with one hand and type with the other, all his attention fixed on the screen. He’s not even _looking_ at his food. Not a single glance. Like his superpower is just knowing where the food is.

“The Broadmoor throws parties pretty frequently, one of which will be this weekend. Ipsilon’s clan family home should be pretty much empty. Seems like a good time to drop in and plant some electronics.”

“You hacked into their intranet?” Eliot asks.

“No, this is through the gap in the Broadmoor’s intranet,” Alec says. “Ipsilon’s intranet it locked up tight. All the other clan family’s intranets I’ve tried have been locked up. Broadmoor is the only one with a leak I can exploit, and even that is limited. They just don’t use it to store much in the way of data. Some financial stuff, and their emails to one another mostly. I have to assume that the kind of data we’re looking for has to be on the Vampire Council’s servers.” 

“How sure are you that Ipsilon’s clan family home will be empty?” Eliot asks.

“RSVP’s, man,” Alec says, grinning and looking away from his computer to meet Eliot’s gaze for a moment. “The Broadmoor has a guest list and a list of RSVP’s. I guess if you’re a vampire, these parties are a big deal, because everyone invited is going. We could break into any of the smaller clan-family homes this weekend with very little chance of getting caught.”

“What about their human servants?” Eliot asks.

“They go with. The specific wording on the invite is that blood will not be supplied, and that guests should bring their own blood servants.” He grins. “Which is good for me, because I now I have a list of the names of the human servants from each clan family from their RSVP’s. I don’t know that they’ll do us a lot of good, but it can’t hurt to research them so that we know what they can do if it ever comes to point where we have to go up against a group of vamps with their human servants with them. Might not get much on them. Some of them will be pretty old, or maybe using different names, like the vampires do, periodically ‘dying’ and leaving all their stuff to their new aliases.”

Eliot nods, slowly making his way through his own omelet. “It can’t hurt to check, and trace those kinds of bequeathals all the way back as far as we can do it by computer. It might give us some idea of the ages of some of these vampires.” He pauses. “Out powers are expanding. Which means there’s a pretty good chance that vampires powers grow as they age as well. So far, we’ve been picking off relatively young ones.”

“It might be moot,” Alec says. “So far, all the older ones are all safe and snug in their clan families and have no reason to break whatever laws govern when it’s permissible to kill humans. They’ve got blood servants… that’s what they call them, blood servants… to feed from regularly, and enough mental abilities to cloud the minds of any normal person and maybe leave them feeling a little weak, but without any idea they’d been fed on by a vampire.”

Eliot gives Hardison a long look. “How do you imagine this going, exactly?” he asks softly. “That we’ll establish some kind of communication with the Vampire Council and that whatever pact they had with Daywalkers like us will be reinitiated and that we’ll all live in peace and harmony afterward?” Eliot shakes his head. “Even if we do make contact, even if the Council as whole wants to re-establish the peace, there are going to be vampires out there that will be against it. We know from Hirota that there is at least one group of very old Daywalkers out there that is trying to keep this ‘war’ going, and if they’re very old, it means they’re almost certainly like us. Born Daywalkers that feed off of vampire blood to extend their lives. A triumvirate, Hirota called us, which is likely what we’re up against, on the Daywalker side. A triumvirate that is far more experienced than we are, and that feeds the solitary Daywalkers just enough information to teach them to kill vampires, conveniently leaving out the possibility that not all vampires are killing humans to survive.” He shakes his head again. “We are going to have to fight dissenters on both sides, and it’s likely that those that we have to fight are going to be older and more powerful than we are. And that’s the best case scenario, Alec. The one where the Vampire Council itself as a whole is open to our overtures of peace and cooperation, and that most of them will be on our side. And if that works, at the very least, we’re going to somehow have to find a way to take over the current Daywalker site and update it with rules regarding when it’s okay for one of _us_ to kill one of _them_.” Eliot sighs. “And all of that depends almost entirely on what the laws the vampires live under say. They may not be something we can live with. We may end up eventually deciding that the laws aren’t good enough to protect the average person, and then what do we do? Try to negotiate for better laws, if we are lucky, and if the Vampire Council is reasonable. If they aren’t, this fight never ends, and if it works out that way, our first targets are the clan families, including the Broadmoor itself, which is packed with vampires that are probably very old. How many clan families lair in the Broadmoor?”

“Six,” Alec says quietly.

“Each one with at least one vampire strong enough to have built a clan family for itself and its progeny, not counting the humans who serve them. Worst case scenario is that we wade through blood to purge the city of vampires entirely, and then every vampire in the country either hunts us, or fortifies their defenses in case we come gunning for them next.”

“The laws have to be good enough,” Alec says grimly. “The pact between the Sun Walkers and the Night Walkers could never have been made if the laws weren’t good enough to protect normal people.”

“We don’t even know how old that pact is,” Eliot says. “Things may have been okay then that are not okay now. The Sun Walkers that made that pact may have had different ideas about acceptable losses than we do. Hell, maybe the old Daywalkers that Hirota mentioned are doing the right thing by not giving us all the information because they don’t agree with whatever acceptable losses were agreed upon by the terms of the original pact.”

Alec presses the thumb and forefinger of one hand against his temples. 

Eliot gentles his voice. “We don’t know enough. That’s the point. But we have to be ready for it to go either way. And whichever way that is, we are still going to have to fight at least some of them, probably on both sides. We have to be prepared for this to be more than just tracking down the solo vamps or the occasional nest. This has the potential to turn into a war, real war, and I just want you to keep that in mind. Everything we’ve done so far has been child’s play, compared to what we may end up against.” 

“Then I need to work on this, and the way to do that is through a terminal in one of the clan family homes. The sooner we can get Parker in there to plant electronics the better. The answers are out there. I just can’t get to them yet. And, no offense, Eliot, but you were trained to expect bloody conflict. It might not be like that.”

Eliot doesn’t have the heart to go over all the reasons why it’s likely to be at least some level of bloody conflict, that it’s likely to be just a matter of scale. He says, “We might get lucky,” instead, and Alec gives him a ghost of a smile.


	32. Chapter 32

Alec spends that week hacking detailed blueprints of Ipsilon’s clan family home while at the same time getting as many details as he can about the member of the clan family via computer. The house is a big Nineteenth Century Antebellum mansion on two acres of land, which is lot of land in the middle of the city the way it is. In the end, the blueprints aren’t on file in the cities computer database, which Alec tells them means that they’re just old enough that they only have them in hard copy. There are permits on file indicating that the building has been upgraded for central heat and air, but that doesn’t give them plans, just information.

Parker surveys the building where the blueprints live for a day and most of a night, while Alec hacks into the city’s municipal files to find out how the older blueprints are stored and organized, so she knows where to look when she breaks in to get them.

They work it like a con, because breaking in during the night is possible and even possibly a little safer, but will leave evidence of a break in, and they don’t want even a rumor of something like this getting back to Ipsilon, or to the rest of the clan families. While they’re at it, they hack and track down the blueprints of the rest of the clan family homes in the city -- six of them are so old that they aren’t copied digitally into the cities archives -- and Parker goes in solo, dressed in one of the sleek little business suits that Sophie had picked out for her, swipes a badge with little to no effort, and sorts through hardcopies until she finds what she’s looking for. They are all on comms during the job, which takes about two hours -- most of it just spent waiting while Parker works her way through the filing system and confiscates blueprints -- but there isn’t much in the way of chatter going on. Both Alec and Eliot had wanted one of them to go with her, just to be on the scene in case something went wrong, but she had smacked them down with pragmatism. It was the middle of the day, she looked like she belonged there, there is no automatic alert issued if an employee discovers they’ve lost a badge, and if this really were a normal con, she would have gone in solo and nobody would have thought twice about it.

She comes out with the blueprints rolled under one arm, and nobody looks twice at her.

Alec and Eliot give each other looks that mean they know they are being paranoid but they can’t help it, and both breathe hearty sighs of relief when Parker casually saunters into the bunker with the plans still tucked under her arm.

Alec immediately digitizes them and searches the city databases for any signs that they’d been updated or remodeled (which he had already done via computer, but which he wants to double check once he has the plans in his hands with the permit numbers and everything right in front of him). They haven’t been, excepting the installation in all six of central heating and air, as far as the city knows, so the plans should be pretty accurate.

They map in a route into Ipsilon over the roof and through the ventilation shafts -- Parker is pleased, as when the big old house had been upgraded, the vents that would have been installed during that time period are huge compared to what normal houses have, she says, especially in a house of that size, which is more or less a mansion -- that will put Parker down in the pantry on the bottom floor. She’ll have to search for the computer terminals from there, they have no way of knowing where they might be, but she doesn’t seem worried. 

Alec gives her intricately detailed instructions on how to hook up his electronics to the terminals, depending on what they look like and how they are set up, and whether or not there is a server (the server, would apparently be ideal, but Ipsilon may not have anything that is recognizably a server if their tech is really behind the times, because they may just be using one of the terminals themselves as a server terminal), which Parker listens to three times, patiently, even smiling a little. When Alec starts to go through it the fourth time, she stops him with a kiss, and says, “I got it, and you’re going to be on comms with me if I forget anything, Alec,” and Alec sighs and agrees and admits to them both that he’s nervous about her going into Ipsilon even though he is nearly certain it will be empty.

Parker spends a couple of hours staking out the house on Monday and Tuesday nights so that she can get a look at the exterior layout, and if possible, a look at the vampires that live there.

Alec goes alone on his own midday jaunt to check out the security system, though he can do everything he needs to do from the van and with binoculars, so he’s in no real danger.

Jairo had been completely and totally right about the system, according to Alec. It’s not just old, it’s antiquated, which is actually kind of annoying, because it’s so old that all the new stuff the van has going for it is _too_ new to link up with it via wi-fi or satellite uplink. Going in through the vents should circumvent her need to disable the external security entirely, but just in case it doesn’t, Parker is going to have to know how to disable it manually. Alec starts to explain to her how, but Parker looks over his shoulder at the printouts, hums a little thoughtfully, and says not to worry about it, she’s done this kind a few times before on some older houses. Alec balks, and Parker patiently goes through each step of disabling the system, until Alec relents and admits she clearly knows what she’s doing.

“She is a thief, you know,” Eliot says.

Alec makes a grunting sound that could indicate anything.

“My point is, she hasn’t always worked with us. For years she was doing it on her own. It only makes sense that she already has her own knowledge base on security systems.”

Alec sighs. “I know. I just don’t like her going in alone, even as sure as I am that the house is going to be empty.”

Eliot can’t really offer any comfort on that score. He doesn’t like it either.


	33. Chapter 33

They spend most of the rest of the week training, researching the Ipsilon clan family in as much detail as they can, and having sex. On Thursday night, Parker pulls out a plastic box filled with needles and nipple rings, and they spend the evening sorting through what she has, and then googling what she doesn’t, so Alec can decide what he likes. When he asks Parker if she has a preference, she gives him a long, serious look, and tells him that there are certain things you can do with rings that you can’t do with barbells, which she then lists off, just, she says, so he’ll know in case he wants to try any of the things you can really only do with rings, but that she personally wants him to have whatever he sees that makes him hard when he thinks about them. She also points out that, once they are healed, it’s not like they can’t swap them out for different sets if they want to.

Alec is hard by the time she finishes telling him these things, and then, without a word, sorts through the sets she has on hand and pulls out a pair of silver barbells with triangular ends.

“They aren’t sharp,” she tells him, “but you’ll be able to feel them all the time.”

He looks away, as though embarrassed, but then visibly gathers himself together and says, “I know. That’s the point.”

“Come to the bedroom,” she says, and walks away in that direction as though she has no doubt that he’ll follow her. 

Alec looks at Eliot. “You coming?” he asks.

“Do you want me to?” Eliot asks, keeping his voice neutral.

“Yeah,” Alec says, and swallows visibly. “I might need you to hold my hand.” It’s a joke, but there is a little tremor in his voice when he says it, so Eliot is absolutely prepared to hold his hand if it turns out to be less of a joke than Alec had meant it to be.

By the time they get to the bedroom, Parker has placed a metal bar with shackles on each end at the head of the bed. Chains dangle from either end, and they both stand there and watch her hook the ends of the chains to the rings in the bed.

Alec’s mind is flickering with both fear and arousal.

“I’ll need to have at least your shirt off to do this, Alec,” Parker says in her gentlest voice, and Alec exhales harshly, but strips off his shirt, and then shucks down his jeans as well.

Eliot is a little shocked to hear Parker say, “Do you want to lie down or do you want me to make you lie down?”

“You don’t have to make me,” Alec says, his tone uncertain, but Eliot had felt the flare of excitement from him at the question, and if he’d felt it, he’s almost sure that Parker had felt it too. He spends about five seconds being surprised at the idea that Alec might want to be forced into position, and then thinks about how Alec fights the bondage every time, how he obviously loves it, but how he still fights it, and takes another second to look at the metal bar, which is plainly steel, and the chains, and the manacles, which are metal, rather than leather, and understands that Alec knows that this time, with this set up, there really is no way for him to get away. The leather he could almost certainly snap if he ever really wanted to, which he must know, but this is something different.

Without thought, just feeling the rightness of it, Eliot slides a hand around Alec’s wrist and twists it up into the center of his back. Alec lets out a little cry of surprise and pain, but his want pulses through the link as sharp and cutting as a razor blade. Eliot catches his other arm in an arm lock and lifts Alec off of his feet, straining to do it because Alec is taller than he is, but managing it because he’d had ten years of combat training under his belt before he’d even met Alec, and Alec has only the last few months of practice. Then Parker is there, beside the bed, gripping the arm that Eliot has in an armbar, and she twists her hips and flips, Eliot letting go of Alec’s wrist at the same time, sending Alec over her extended thigh and onto his back on the bed. He lands with his feet facing the side of the bed, and both Eliot and Parker crawl onto the bed, both of them half pinning him down, and that’s when he starts to fight.

It’s too late, and it’s two on one, but he doesn’t hold back, shifts up and plants an elbow into Eliot’s belly, sending the breath out of him in a rush, but Eliot had been ready for it, and it’s really only Eliot Alec is fighting. Eliot even knows why. Alec’s Nana would kill him if he ever tried to hit a girl, and this is not just any girl, it’s Parker. They wrestle him up and sideways, so that his feet are pointed toward the end of the bed, and Parker drags one wrist up and into the bend of the right manacle and then snaps it closed. Eliot doesn’t do the same; this is, in a weird way, between Parker and Alec, and he can be involved in it, but has to be only peripherally involved in it. He lets Parker take over his grip on Alec’s other wrist and slowly muscle it down -- Alec’s biceps are bunching as he resists the downward pressure she’s asserting -- until it touches the curve of the cuff, and she snaps it closed. It makes a distinct clicking sound, and Eliot sees that it has neither buttons nor buckles, but an actual keyhole, so that Alec is locked down, made truly helpless for the first time.

Parker scoots down the bed and grabs Alec’s ankles and pulls him down, so that the bar is above his head and his arms are spread up above him.

Alec has gone loose and limp. He’s breathing in ragged little gasps, but he’s gone still. His eyes are closed. Eliot hears two more clicks, one directly after the other, and circles the bed so that he can see that there is a bar between Alec’s ankles as well, and manacles around them, securely chained to the bolts in the frame of the bed. Parker has pulled him down far enough that his knees are bent, though, and the bar between his ankles doesn’t actually rest on the foot of the bed.

For the right position, Eliot guesses. To keep Alec’s hands where she needs them, Alec is lying in almost the center of the bed, his knees bent over the bottom edge to keep his arms up above his head.

Eliot thinks about being manacled to the bed with the bars and the chains and is absolutely unable to sort out whether he would like it or not. The idea sends chills down his spine, but it had taken him a little time to settle into being bound down all the way with just the leather, which he could break. His hands hadn’t really bothered him that much, but it had taken him longer to accept that having his legs bound too was good for him. A hang up in his mind, he knows, not in his body. A mental hang up. He doesn’t know if this would be the same or not.

Parker crawls up and straddles Alec’s hips. “Normally, this is the point where I’d give you a safe word,” Parker says. “Actually, I would have given you both safe words a long time ago except for the link marks. But this time you really can’t break free, and the link marks are still there, and I am sure, Alec, I am absolutely sure I will feel it if you need to stop, but you should still have the option for a safe word if you want one.”

Alec shivers a little, like he can feel her voice brushing across his skin. He opens his eyes. They are a little dazed, he feels a little dazed in the link, but he also feels like he is ablaze with a want so intense that it feels more like need to Eliot, and he gets what Parker had said, that she had already known that Alec was more hardcore than Eliot was, because Eliot can’t imagine lying there, having been made helpless, and being so overwhelmed with that kind of need that there is no room for anything else in the link.

“I trust you. I trust Eliot,” Alec says.

Parker strokes his face. “Do you need to fight for a while? You can if you need to, Alec, but I’ll need for you to be still when I pierce you, so if you need that, you should do it now.”

Alec blinks at her slowly. Eliot watches, fascinated, as Alec clenches his fists, then flexes his arms, arches his back, twists his hips, tenses his thighs, pulls at his feet, but not the way he does it when he’s bound down with the leather restraints. All of this is slow, not like he’s fighting, but like he’s just checking the sturdiness of what is holding him. Like he has to test them, to know, and then he shakes his head. “I might have to when you fuck me, either of you, I might need that when it’s sex, but I don’t need it now.” His voice is low and just a little slurred, and his expression is relaxed, his eyes still a little dazed, but Eliot can still feel that need radiating from the link, strong and twisted up with something like desperation.

Parker bends down and kisses him. “Good boy,” she says, and Alec twitches a little in his restraints, and lust pierces the need for a moment, sharp and prickly, and Eliot can’t quite grasp what emotion Parker had just dragged out of Alec, it’s too quick, but if it had been _him_ she had said that to, like that, with Eliot bound down like that, if it had been him, it would have been humiliation, and Eliot, hard already, feels the idea of it twist in his balls in a way that he can’t decipher, can’t tell if it’s good or bad, the idea of feeling that. 

Eliot circles the bed and drags a plush chair over to the edge of it, sinking down onto it slowly, his attention entirely fixed on Alec and Parker, pushing away whatever he might or might not have felt. This is something special for the two of them, something good, and he wants to be part of it, even if that’s only through the link marks. So he sits back and watches as Parker snags the box of needles and supplies from the bedside table. She pops open a little tube of something that smells like alcohol but is probably just hand sanitizer, squeezes a blob of it into her palm, and rubs her hands together. Then she plucks a paper packet out of the box and rips it open; Eliot recognizes the scent of alcohol again, and Parker wipes down Alec’s nipples with it, quickly, but not like she’s in a hurry. Just like she’s not that worried about infection, and considering the fact that they’ll be able to heal Alec with their blood in a matter of a minute or so, it makes sense.

“There is the professional way to do this and the more… personal way to do this,” Parker says. She pulls out a metal thing that Eliot has to look at for a few seconds to recognize as forceps and shows it to Alec. “I can do it either way. If you think you might jerk or try to pull back, tell me now, so that I know which way to do it.”

“I can be still,” Alec says, low but certain. “I don’t need those.”

Parker sets them aside without comment, as though Alec’s assurance is all she needs. She pulls a sealed needle from the box and sits it on Alec’s chest. Then she produces the set of barbells he’d picked out, opens the little plastic baggie they’re in, and wipes them down with the alcohol swab.

She smiles brightly, and her excitement in the link is different than Alec’s, narrower and more focused, she feels like she feels when she’s picking a lock, except the feeling is twined up with sex and power. “Ready?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Alec says, closing his eyes for a few long seconds. “Go for it.”

Parker pops the sterile packaging off the needle and discards it carelessly next to the alcohol swab. She looks at Alec’s face for a long moment, as though she is memorizing the way he looks, and then she bends and tugs Alec’s right nipple up between forefinger and thumb, twisting it a little and then tugging up a little more, positioning her fingers beneath the nub of flesh, and without further warning, she pushes the needle into and through Alec’s nipple. Eliot watches it go in one side and come out the other, a bead of bright blood welling up at the puncture site. Alec lets out a low, harsh groan, but is perfectly still. Parker picks up one of the barbells, leaving the needle just sitting on Alec’s chest, still thrust through his nipple, and unscrews the end of it. Then she picks up something small that Eliot hadn’t noticed before, a short, narrow length of flexible tubing, and slides the threaded end of the barbell into it. She slides the other end onto the end of the needle, and this time when she pulls the needle, she goes slowly. Eliot watches the little tube disappear into Alec’s flesh, and then the barbell itself is tugged in after it. The needle and tubing appear out of the other side along with the threaded end of the barbell. She pulls the tubing free, uses the alcohol swab to wipe blood away, and then screws the triangular end of the barbell in place.

Alec’s breathing has gone quick and Eliot can feel him in the link, that deep twist of need still there, but mixed up now with something light and euphoric.

“Good boy,” Parker breathes, and Alec’s breath hitches, and that quick stab of lust pierces through everything else again, mixing with that feeling of euphoria. Parker gently nudges the end of the barbell, and Alec hisses out a sound of pain, but it doesn’t put a dent in the way he feels in the link. “Feel alright? Eliot, take a look, let’s make sure it’s straight.”

Eliot stands up and leans in to look; there is barely any blood, and the silver is stunning against Alec’s dark skin. It’s straight, not that Eliot would have expected anything else, but it’s also something else, something that goes straight to Eliot’s cock. It’s _marking_ him, a permanent alteration of his body that _they_ are doing to him. Yes, it’s Parker that is doing all the work, but it’s still something both of them are doing, something Alec wants for them to do. “It’s gorgeous,” Eliot says roughly. “I want to put my mouth on it.”

“Your saliva may heal the edges, but we’ll need blood to heal it all the way through,” Parker says.

“That’s not why I want to do it,” Eliot says, urgency pooling in his groin.

“Yeah, let him do it,” Alec says, and Eliot looks up and sees Alec looking at him with dazed eyes.

Parker glances at Eliot, her gaze a little sharp, and then he feels her in the link, taking in the way he feels at seeing it, and her gaze goes hot and the feel of her in the link is knowing, and she nods and gestures an invitation.

Eliot dips down and slides his tongue along Alec’s nipple, tasting mostly alcohol, and a little blood; Alec moans and arches his back and Eliot catches the barbell between his teeth and tugs gently on it, tasting a little more blood in his mouth and feeling Alec shudder, and grate out a low sound that is a mashup of pain and pleasure and satisfaction and desire. Eliot twirls his tongue around the piercing, just to hear Alec make that sound again, to feel him, humming with need in the link, and then pulls back reluctantly. Alec is breathing hard and fast; Eliot can see his cock jerking where it’s lying across his stomach, hard and leaking a little pool of precome onto his belly.

He wants to fuck Alec, he wants to do it before they heal him so that his nipples jolt with pain every time Eliot shoves his cock into him. Parker gets to do the piercing, she knows how and understands why, but Eliot wants to do the claiming, wants that to be his part of this thing. But he sits back in his chair, feeling Parker looking at him for a few more seconds, and merely watches as she pierces Alec’s other nipple, her hands quick and graceful, every movement economical, making it obvious that she’s done this before, but that doesn’t matter either. No one she’s ever done this to before means anything to her the way that Alec does.

Alec whines a little as she pulls the tubing and the barbell through his nipple this time, but stays perfectly still like before, and when Parker screws the end of the barbell in place, that euphoria he’s putting out becomes almost more than Eliot can stand. Parker shoves everything except the needle back into the box; the needle she sets carefully on the bedside table. Then she looks at Eliot, a question, and then smiles a little, like she can see the answer in his face and leans back to give him room to reach across Alec’s chest and take the piercing into his mouth, pressing at it with his tongue, but gently, and still Alec grates out that sound, like it hurts and feels wonderful and he’s desperate and satisfied all at once.

Parker doesn’t even ask him, doesn’t ask either of them. She swings her leg over Alec’s hip and slides off the edge of the bed, moving around to the foot, and unhooks the chains from the bottom set of ring and catches the bar in her hand, pulling it up so that it rests just above Alec’s waist, bending Alex’s legs up, knees pulled up to his chest. His cock is still hard and lying in a little slick of wet at the tip, though the change in position has smeared it so it’s no longer a little pool. His ass is exposed, the whole position making him look _available_ in a way that makes Eliot’s pulse thunder. Then Parker hooks the chains in place again, and hands Eliot a tube of lube.

Alec’s eyes are open, and he’s watching Eliot, still looking dazed. Eliot tosses the tube of lube onto the bed and strips as quickly as he can, and then crawls up the bed to kneel between Alec’s spread thighs.

“Alec,” Eliot says, and then, “Alec?” a question.

“Yeah, Eliot, yes,” Alec says.

“Do they hurt?” Eliot asks, even as he’s lubing up his fingers and sliding them down the cleft of Alec’s ass.

“Yessssss,” Alec hisses, making it obvious that he knows Eliot fucking him like this, with them still freshly pierced, will make them hurt more, and that he still wants Eliot to do it.

Eliot slides a finger into him fast, and Alec’s whole body clenches. He lets out a hoarse shout of pain and surprise, and then groans and relaxes back onto the bed, loose and easy. Eliot rushes through the prep, being thorough, but going quick, not teasing as he sometimes does, not pausing to stroke Alec’s prostate, but just getting him wet and getting him open so Eliot can get inside, and Alec lies there and takes it all without any of the straining or clenching or flexing that he usually does. He is needy and desperate in the link, but he is also almost relaxed, and his body is still loose and almost limp, like he feels no need to strain for or against Eliot, like he’s ready to take it without feeling the need to do anything to urge him on or hurry him.

When Eliot presses into him, doing it as slowly as he can manage under the circumstances, which is not as slowly as maybe he should, Alec lets out a low, soft whine, the same sound again, all mixed up, pain and pleasure and desire and satisfaction, and then whispers, “Eliot,” with a kind of quiet urgency that Eliot can both hear in his voice and feel in the link.

“Jesus,” Eliot says, and draws back, and then plunges back inside, dragging a little cry from Alec, still a quiet sound, an almost pleading sound, and his body stays relaxed and willing under Eliot, so willing that Eliot can’t help but do the same again, hard and fast. Alec cries out every time Eliot slams into him, but they are low, needy cries, like Alec is desperate for it, and all sense of pacing himself or being gentle or careful seems to recede further every time Eliot hears that sound, until he is pounding Alec, one hand above his shoulder and one hand wrapped around the bar holding his legs up, and Alec is unbelievably appealing like this, open and without even the twitch of a struggle, even as Eliot can see the wince of pain on his face at his sore nipples every time Eliot surges forward into him. It doesn’t last long; Eliot doesn’t even try to hold back. He shoves into Alec again and again until he can feel his orgasm rushing toward him, and then lets go of the bar to wrap his fist around Alec’s cock.

Alec groans and spills over Eliot’s hand almost at once, like he’d been on the verge for ages, and Eliot comes as soon as Alec’s body clenches around him, tight and heated and shuddering. Eliot lets out a harsh cry as he spills into Alec, as though Alec’s unusual silence goads him into it, and then somehow manages not to fall forward over Alec and crush his newly pierced nipples, getting his thighs to cooperate and bunch so that he sits upright, still deep inside Alec. Alec’s face is slack, his mind in the link a low throbbing buzz of pleasure, and he looks so soft, his face gentle, his eyes closed, that Eliot is half tempted to get Parker to bite his cock so that he can do it all again and have Alec like this, all sweet and easy and wanting.

He sits like that for a little while, feeling almost as dazed as Alec looks, and it’s Parker that finally brings him back to himself when she appears on one side of the bed and unlocks Alec’s right ankle from the cuff, and then circles and unlocks the left one. She deftly maneuvers the bar out from under his legs, and Alec’s thighs slide down to rest atop Eliot’s thighs, knees still bent a little. Parker unlocks Alec’s wrists, and Alec finally opens his eyes, a little more present in them now. He rubs gently at one of his wrists, and then the other, and the smile he turns in Eliot’s directions is so sweet and gentle that Eliot’s chest clenches, a hard knot of something behind his breastbone that hurts for a second, and then unwinds, leaving his chest still a little tight, but warm with happiness he hadn’t known he could feel until these two, until this thing between the three of them, hadn’t even really believed in until he had already been in the middle of it, and even now still has some trouble really believing he gets to have it, that it’s his, because of them, because they are his.

“How do they feel?” Parker asks, indicating Alec’s nipples without touching them, and Alec smiles a little, a touch of that euphoria still lingering in the link.

“Man, they hurt, but they feel great. I mean, it’s pain, but it’s not like any kind of pain I’ve ever felt before. I almost don’t want you to heal them.” He smiles a little when he says it, but Eliot can tell that it’s close to true. That there is something Alec likes so much about it that he almost wants to live with the pain, let them heal on their own, feel the pull of it every time he moves for the next few weeks, and if it weren’t for the way their lives are right now, Eliot would want to let him have that.

Parker says, “We have to heal these, Alec, but I can put a needle in you any time you want it,” her voice almost reverent in its gentleness.

Alec’s eyes go wide, and for a moment he is clenched tight around Eliot’s softening cock still inside him, and then he breaks out into a wide and delighted smile, like Parker has offered him bricks of gold rather than being stabbed with needles. “Yeah,” he says, and closes his eyes for a long moment. “I can not believe I’m saying this, but yeah, you could do that, and I’m fucking looking forward to it.” His eyes are bright and happy when he opens them. “What is it called, wanting to be jabbed with needles?” he asks Parker.

“Depends a little on what you’re getting from it,” Parker says, and slides her hip onto the edge of the bed to sit next to Alec’s chest. “Just needle play, but it can also be a form of sensation play, which is something a little different. It means that you get off on a lot of different kinds of sensations, not just needles, but maybe lots of other things, that most people might not immediately slot into acts of pleasure. We’ll have to experiment a little to see. It could be just straight up masochism. I don’t think it’s intense masochism, for you, but you said you liked being spanked, so it may be just that you get off on a little pain. It may be a mix of any of those. I wouldn’t have thought to let Eliot fuck you when they had just been pierced, though,” Parker admits. “I would have thought it would be too much for you, but the way you both looked, and the things I could feel through the links… It was a little overwhelming, even just for me, just watching and feeling the two of you.” She smiles. “You are going to be a lot of fun to figure out,” she tells him, her smile going a little wicked. Then she throws a glance over her shoulder at Eliot, and says, “And _you_ ,” as if that means something very specific. “You wanted to hurt him. You wanted to fuck him while the piercings were fresh and he could feel them pull every time you moved.” She is smiling, but like she’s still a little surprised. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for even a little bit of a sadist, Eliot.”

“He wanted it,” Eliot says. “I could feel it, and it made me want it, too.” It’s easy to admit, easier than he would have ever believed.

“We’re going to have to try everything,” Parker murmurs, her voice almost a purr. “Even the things that none of us have ever thought about wanting. The link marks make it so we can’t screw it up, and it means that we never have to be scared.” Her cheeks go a little pink, but her smile grows wider. “I don’t have to be scared of the cuffs anymore,” she says almost dreamily. “I can have…” she begins, but doesn’t finish the sentence. Eliot gets a feeling from her, a sense of peace, and he might be able to get more from her, as open as she seems to be feeling right now, but he decides not to push.

Instead he says, “You can have whatever you want. We will give you anything you want.”

A tear slips down her cheek, but she’s still smiling. She wipes it absently away, as though she’s barely aware of it, but seeing it makes Eliot absolutely desperate to give her whatever it is she needs that she hasn’t been getting since her bad experience with a pair of cuffs. He’d do it now, take her down gently and lock her down and kiss her everywhere and feel her out and wind her up and push her into that place she has been missing, that peace, but he really can’t get it up again any time soon. He wonders if Alec might be up for it, but when he glances down, Alec is limp and small, and Eliot notices that there are little rivulets of blood running down from the edges of the piercings, drying now, nothing serious, but that he’d clearly made Alec bleed while he fucked him, if only a little, and definitely because Alec had wanted it, but it’s still a little bit of a shock.

“I know,” Parker says, still smiling. “We’ll talk about it soon. Right now, let’s get Alec cleaned up and healed up.”

Eliot kind of grudgingly pulls his cock free of Alec’s body and backs up on his knees, and watches Parker produce an alcohol wipe from her piercing box and clean up the blood on Alec’s chest. Alec shifts a little, wincing but also gasping a little. “Are you sure we have to…?” he begins, and Parker gives him a smirk, not letting him finish.

“Trust me, this will not feel nearly as good when you’re swinging a sword.”

Alec considers that for a moment, and then slowly nods. “Yeah, okay, that’s probably true.”

She extends her fangs and knicks her fingertip, and then lifts up one end of the barbell on Alec’s right nipple and lets her blood run along the length of it. For a long moment it just pools at the edge of Alec’s nipple, and then, as if sensing where it’s needed, it disappears into the puncture. Alec sighs a little, then smiles. “It itches a little. Like a healing scrape. Not like the blood healing we did when we got a little sliced up during sword practice.”

“It’s already partly healed,” Parker says, and grasps the end of the barbell on Alec’s other nipple. “Eliot’s saliva would have healed the edges already, and just left the inside unhealed.” She dribbles blood down the length of the barbell and they watch again as it puddles for a few seconds, and then flows into the wound. She licks the tip of her finger, closing the knick she’d opened there, and then gently runs her fingertips along Alec’s right nipple. He shivers a little and the nipple goes taut, but he shakes his head.

“No pain,” he says. She checks the left too, but the blood had done it’s job. 

Then she flicks the end of the barbell through his left nipple, and Alec gasps out a little sound of surprise and pleasure. The nipple goes hard, just like the other, and she spends a couple of seconds just tugging at them both, gently, almost not force behind it at all, but Alec still gasps and arches up into her touch.

“You’re lucky,” she says. “Some men have sensitive nipples, some men don’t. Eliot’s are a little sensitive, but not like yours.” She sounds pleased. 

“What about yours?” Alec asks. “I know they’re sensitive.”

Parker pauses, her fingertips still resting on Alec’s nipples, looking thoughtful. “You know, I don’t really know. I’ve never had any play piercing done on myself. I know I like some pain, biting and twisting, but I’m honestly not sure if I’d like to be pierced.” She tweaks one of Alec’s nipples. “We’ll give play piercing a try if you want to, if you think you’d like my nipples pierced.” She glances at Eliot. “Any opinion?”

“I think I could go either way,” Eliot says, picturing it in his mind. “If we were to pierce you, I think I’d like to go with rings though. Either way, your breasts are perfect, so mostly it’s up to you. If you find out you like it, we’ll do it. If not, I’m not going to be horribly disappointed.”

Parker shrugs. “Like I said, we all have to try everything. With the link marks, there’s almost no guesswork involved. As soon as we try something, we’ll be able to tell if it’s working. No wonder Selena went on and on about sex with her master in her journal. I thought maybe she was actually in love with him, but now I think it’s just this. That there’s absolutely no way to fuck it up.”

Alec reaches up and tugs at the barbells, then presses on them, then twists them a little. “Hrm.”

Eliot arches his brows in question.

“It feels good when I do it, but not anywhere near as good as it feels when Parker does it,” he says. “Which is probably a good thing. I might not be able to keep my hands off of myself.”

Eliot laughs.

Parker gives him a long look. “Are you going to let us try play piercing you?” she asks. “You don’t have the kind of sensitivity that Alec has, but aesthetically, you’d look good pierced.”

Eliot tries to consider having his nipples pierced, he really does, but the idea doesn’t do much for him. On the other hand, things that work for Alec and Parker usually work for him, so if it ends up that they just really like the way he looks with pierced nipples, he thinks he’ll probably let them do it. “We can give it a try,” he says. “I feel mostly indifferent to having pierced nipples, but if the two of you ended up feeling like you’d really like the look of them, I could probably be convinced.”

Parker grins. “Honestly, if we were going to pierce you, I’d say it should be your cock.”

Eliot blinks in surprise.

“A Jacob’s ladder for you. Your cock is definitely sensitive enough for you to get off on it, and it would drive Alec crazy when you fuck him.” She lifts Eliot’s mostly limp cock and looks at the underside of it. “You’re long enough that we could probably fit eight barbells.”

“I don’t know what a Jacob’s ladder is,” Eliot says, and is not sure at all about the idea of having needles jabbed through his cock.

“It’s a row of barbells running up the underside of your cock,” Alec says, and Eliot can feel the little shiver of excitement that runs through Alec. “From the bottom to just under the head. It’s supposed to be really good for both the one with the piercings and the one getting fucked by the pierced cock.” 

“How do you know that?” Eliot asks, still firmly on the fence.

Alec makes a little pshaw sound. “I am a computer nerd. Half of what I know about sex, I know from computer porn,” he says, and grins. “A Prince Albert is supposed to be really good for the one getting fucked, but I’ve read it can kind of be a pain in the ass for the one with the piercing. Besides that, the head of your cock is kind of perfect. I’m not that interested in modifying it.”

“I’d be up for a clit piercing,” Parker says almost casually, “but I’d want to have it done by a professional. Even with the link marks, the clit is tricky. If you do it wrong, you can fuck up the nerve sensitivity there, and that is something I’m not willing to risk.”

Eliot has the sudden vivid mental image of using his tongue to tug at a ring through Parker’s clit and hearing what she might sound like, and his cock twitches a little against his thigh.

Parker’s lips quirk into a tiny smile. “Like that idea, do you?” she says slyly.

Eliot shrugs a little helplessly. “I have a vivid imagination,” he says. “But I’m not sure about having needles jabbed through my cock, so I’ll make you a deal. If you get your clit pierced, I’ll put aside my nerves and let you pierce my cock.”

“It’s a deal,” Parker says at once, all in a rush, and Eliot feels a little like he might have been tricked into something. Parker grins. “I can do the Jacob’s ladder myself, and the link marks will let us know if it’s not okay,” she says, as though reminding him. “But you have to let me get one totally done and blood healed and then fuck one of us with it in before you decide it’s a no go. The piercing will hurt. There are things we can do to distract you from that, but the piercing part will hurt. But I think you’ll find out once it’s in and healed that it will be worth it.”

And Eliot can sense in the link that she feels pretty confident of that, so he pushes back the parts where needles are jabbed in his cock, and decides to trust in her experience.

“All right,” he says. “It’s a deal.” He manages to sound mostly calm when he says it, and even feel mostly calm. Parker, he decides, can be too damned tricky.

Alec is grinning smugly, which he can afford to do. No one is talking about piercing his cock.

“I really can’t believe I just agreed to that,” Eliot says after a few moments have passed in silence. 

Parker twists around on the bed and leans into him, her breasts brushing against his chest, and kisses him slowly and softly, just the slick and languorous slide of lips and tongue, no teeth at all. “You know the ridges on the red dildo I use on you,” she asks, pulling away only slightly, so that they are still very close. Eliot nods. “The Jacob’s ladder will feel like those ridges against Alec’s prostate, only _more_. They’ll be good for me, too, any toy with bumps or ridges is good for me. But for you, every time one of us clenches down around your cock, they’ll press into you, and it will be better than you can imagine. I am _sure_ you’ll like a Jacob’s ladder, Eliot. The only part I’m not sure about is the part where we pierce you. That may be too much for you. If so, we won’t do it. But if we can get you through that part, it will be totally worth it.”

Eliot feels himself shudder a little at the idea of it. “You don’t have to convince me,” he says. “I already agreed.”

“But if you can think about the ladder and how it will feel, and be able to look forward to that, it might get you through the piercing part,” she says. “So it seemed like a good idea to let your vivid imagination dwell on what it will be like when it’s done.”

Eliot nods, he gets what she’s doing, and he’s willing to try. “Okay,” he says.


	34. Chapter 34

Friday night, Parker suits up in her breaking and entering gear, skintight lycra leggings and top, super thin black gloves, and her harness. She adds a stake and a throwing knife to her gear, which is extremely light on weaponry, but they are counting on the house being empty, and even adding those two items causes her to have to carry a small bag, since there is nowhere on the breaking and entering gear to secure them. Getting up to the roof is going to be no problem because there are stairs up to the second and third story verandas and a trellis she can climb the rest of the way up. She knows how to disable the security if the need arises, though it shouldn’t since she’s going through the vents. 

They stake out the place early, before the sun goes down, wanting to make sure that everyone on the list that is supposed to leave actually does leave. This leaves Eliot in the van, because Alec is the only one of them that is sure he can recognize all the faces well enough to be sure no one is left behind, and counting heads just isn’t good enough for his peace of mind. 

Parker and Alec cross onto the property from a wooded area in the subdivision behind it and position themselves, Alec near the front of the house and hidden behind the lush vegetation that surrounds the old house, and Parker near the detached garage, which she reports contains two limousines and a pair of identical Mercedes. Alec is pretty sure one of the blood servants will pull the car around front to pick up the passengers, which is why he takes the front of the house, but in case they don’t, Parker at the garage will be able to at least count heads, and recognize most if not all of their faces from her stalking and picture taking earlier in the week. It’s the best they can really do.

Ipsilon is a small clan family, two blood servants and seven vampires. According to what Hardison had been able to track via computer records of the original purchase of the property, subsequent deaths and the “wills” that designate who the property has been left to, the Master vampire of Ipsilon’s original name had been Everett Corson, and Everett had liked his name enough to pass it down to his entirely imaginary progeny, so the current owner of the property is Everett Corson the Fourth. There are even marriage records on file for probably imaginary wives and birth and death certificates for the original Everett Corson and ECII and ECIII. All of that means that Everett Corson is probably a least a couple of hundred years old. Alec had managed to get the current names of the other vampires in Ipsilon through a relatively simple DMV check for driver’s licenses that list the mansion as the address. He has the RSVP list to compare those names to, of course, and DMV pictures, along with pictures he’d found in the Broadmoor’s database and pictures Parker had taken during the last week, during which she’d spent at least a couple of hours stalking the house each night, but which she had actually managed to get all of in the first two nights, as the clan family in its entirety had gone out both Monday and Tuesday nights, dressed formally according to her information, like they were going to a formal dinner or party, evening gowns and tuxedos for the vampires, well cut, expensive suits for the blood servants. She’d gotten close enough to get good pictures, which Alec matches up with what he gets from the DMV and the Broadmoor’s database, so that they have solid information on which to base the assumption that no one else that they haven’t seen yet lives in Ipsilon. It’s still possible, of course. There are holes in their methods they can’t do anything about. There may be vampires that live there that aren’t invited to the Broadmoor’s soiree, or that don’t have driver’s licenses, and thus aren’t in the DMV’s database, or that did not join the rest of their clan family in their outings, but there is just no way to be sure.

Eliot is counting on Parker, really. That she’ll be able to get close enough to the house to sense if there are other vampires in it before she goes inside.

They pass the time waiting mostly in silence. Dusk falls, and one of the blood servants comes out of the house and pulls one of the limousines out into the circular drive, and spends an hour polishing it up, even though it’s already obviously so clean it sparkles. At 10:30, the vampires of Ipsilon spill out the front door, dressed formally again, all sparkling evening gowns and jewelry and tuxedos, the blood servants again in expensive, well-tailored suits. One of the blood servants opens the door of the limousine for the vampires, and they all take their sweet time climbing inside. He closes the door when the last vampire is inside, and he goes around to the driver’s side. The other blood servant goes to the passenger side in the front and gets in.

By 10:45, the drive is empty, the house is dark except for the front porch light, and Alec tells them that everyone they know about from Ipsilon had gotten into the car, so the house should be empty. They wait another fifteen minutes, just to be safe.

“I’m starting up,” Parker says through her earbud.

“Remember that we still can’t be sure that’s everyone there is. It’s only everyone we could find out about,” Alec says, sounding worried.

“I don’t sense any vampires in the house,” Parker says reassuringly.

Through his binoculars, Eliot can barely make out Parker as a shadow among other shadows. Without his enhanced vision, he wouldn’t have been able to see her at all. In only a moment, she says, “I”m at the trellis, this is the only part that might make some noise.”

Eliot can’t see her from where he is. The trellis is at the back of the house. He waits, his hand wrapped around the hilt of the sword belted to his waist, because he can’t do anything else. A minute or so later, Alec opens up the passenger side of the van and climbs in, his face grim.

“On the roof,” Parker tells them. Eliot looks for her, but sees nothing moving up there. She really is good. “I’m not narrating this. I’m almost sure there are no vampires in this house, but if there is a human servant of some kind, talking would just be stupid. Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

Eliot feels like the silence goes on for about six hours.

“They have a server,” Parker eventually whispers. “It’s an older model, but it’s got the right ports.”

Alec lets out a long breath, and he and Eliot exchange looks that convey that they are aware of their own paranoia, but can do nothing to alleviate it.

A moment later, Parker snorts softly. “They’ve got all their passwords and codes written down under a mouse pad.” They hear a soft click. 

That is actually great news. Eliot had been willing to use Jairo’s passcode to log into the Vampire Council’s database if he had to, but he’d rather not, in case it can be traced back to him. They likely wouldn’t need to use it at all. Alec will hack in once he’s got the electronics in place. But it’s good to have a backup plan, and having Ipsilon’s passcodes means leaving Jairo’s unused.

They wait. Right now in the house, Parker is most likely logging into the Vampire Council’s database and downloading anything that looks like it might be history or laws onto a flash drive. Doing it from inside using Ipsilon’s codes isn’t likely to throw up any red flags, and the less hacking Alec has to do, the better. Best case scenario, they get the data like this, have the time to go over it, and the only time Alec has to hack into the database is when they decide whether or not they want to make contact with the Vampire Council and what they want to say to them if they do.

Minutes pass. No sound comes from Parker’s end. Eliot is usually good at waiting, but his grip on his sword keeps getting tighter, and he can feel Alec’s anxiety ratcheting upward notch by notch as more time goes by.

“Check in,” Eliot says finally, because he can’t stand the silence any longer.

No response.

Then: “Hi there,” Parker says, and it’s clear in the link that she isn’t talking to them.

Eliot and Alec exchange one brief glance, and then both fling themselves out of the van and head toward the house at a dead run.

“Are you here all alone?” Parker asks, her voice low and soothing.

“My nanny is asleep,” a high, piping voice answers. “You don’t live here.”

“No, I’m just visiting,” Parker says in that same, soothing voice. “Do you live here?”

“Yes,” the child’s voice answers. “My daddy works for Mr. Corson. I do, too, sometimes,” the child says, Eliot thinks it’s a girl, but depending on the age, it could be either. The child’s voice is filled with pride. “When I’m older, I’ll be like my daddy, but right now I’m too little. I can only give a little blood.”

Eliot and Alec pause, feet on the end of the drive, and exchange a look.

“Do you like giving blood?” Parker asks.

“It hurts a little, but then it feels good. It’s okay, I guess,” the child answers.

“That is so fucked up,” Alec whispers.

“Do you ever get to drink the blood?” Parker asks.

“Only once,” the child says. “To do the binding to the clan family. That was good.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” Parker says. “You can drink some of my blood, if you want to.”

Alec and Eliot exchange another look. They continue up the drive, slower this time. Parker’s mind lashes out at them for an instant, a clear order not to interfere.

“Will it be super blood, like the last time?” the child asks. “So that I can see in the dark and everything?”

“Yes,” Parker says.

“I don’t have fangs to bite you with,” the child says. “Mr. Corson had to bite his wrist for me.” The child’s voice is suddenly suspicious. “You _do_ have fangs, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Parker says calmly. “See.”

Several seconds pass in silence. Eliot and Alec are almost to the front porch. Eliot ponders their options for a long moment, and then pulls Alec behind a clump of shrubs and elephant ear plants, and drags him downward, so that they are crouched out of sight of the house.

“You won’t tell anyone?” the child asks, sounding excited and conspiratorial. 

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” Parker says, and Eliot can hear the smile in her voice.

“Okay,” the child says. There are several long moments of silence. Eliot is fighting the desire to go into the house grab Parker or the child or both, and get the hell out of here.

“You were asleep in your room all night,” Parker says, her voice soft, but firm this time. “You didn’t get up. You didn’t see me. You don’t remember me. Okay?”

“Okay,” the child says, voice slow and a little dazed sounding.

“Go back up and get in bed. You will fall asleep right away,” Parker says.

The child yawns audibly.

There is silence for another full minute, then another, and then Parker says, “I’m on my way out.”

Eliot and Alec slowly rise to their feet and jog back to the van. Eliot is still half considering breaking into the house and getting the kid. Alec’s face is set into lines of disapproval, but in the link he feels more dismayed than actually disapproving.

Six minutes later, the back door of the van slides open and Parker gets in. “Let’s get out of here,” she says, her voice flat and short.

“Do we just leave her there?” Alec asks, twisting in his seat to look at Parker, the dismay on his face clearer now. “We don’t even know what your blood will do to a kid. And if the vampires are drinking from her…”

Parker gives him a long look. “Blood servants are a family business,” she says. “We know that from the Daywalker archive. Generations of the same family will serve the same clan family. I didn’t think of what that might mean for a little kid, but it fits in with what we know. And they don’t drink from her often. And she can’t really drink from them at all until she’s older, since it slows down the aging process for a blood servant to drink from a vampire.” Her expression flickers, a moment of distress, but she says, “We can’t take her. What would we even do with her? She’s in her father’s custody. We can’t exactly tell the authorities that he’s abusing her in some way without outing ourselves and sounding like crazy people. The most we could do was drop her off with the cops, which we couldn’t do without answering a lot of questions, and which would also alert the vampires that someone had broken into their lair, and she would go back to her father. I know how the system works. They would see no reason to take her from him.”

“How old is she?” Eliot asks.

“Kid aged,” Parker snaps. “I don’t know about how to tell how old a kid is. Maybe six or seven.” She takes a deep breath, obviously trying to get herself under control. “We can’t do anything about her,” she says finally, sounding weary. “And for what it’s worth, she looks perfectly healthy. I mean, it’s obvious that they aren’t feeding off of her and draining her. She looks and smells perfectly healthy.”

“We still don’t know what your blood will do to her,” Alec says quietly. 

“I don’t think it will do anything at all. My blood doesn’t even give the two of you anything in the way of enhanced abilities; we drink from humans for that, or vampires. All I did was feed her a little of my blood so I could use my mental abilities to make her forget I was ever there.” Parker is silent for a long moment, and then she says, slowly but firmly, “Also, she was absolutely fearless. Even though I was a stranger in her house, she’s so used to being perfectly safe where she lives that it didn’t scare her. Which means that normally, she is perfectly safe there. Nobody hurts her. She assumed that she was safe because she was at home, and when she is at home she’s safe. I know what it feels like to not feel safe at home. It’s weird to us, it feels wrong to us, but for her, it’s normal, and not even bad normal, but safe normal. What would we do for her or to her to make her life better than that?”

Eliot starts the engine and pulls away from the curb. Alec is still twisted around in his seat, looking at Parker. “You don’t like it either,” he says, sounding certain.

“No,” Parker says, sounding weary again. “But I am biased. I don’t like vampires feeding off of anyone. This is outside of our realm of experience, though. We can only go by what is right for her, and taking her away from her father and her clan family would frighten her. Since she’s bound to the clan family, it might even hurt her, since we don’t know what it means to have a blood servant that’s bound to a clan family. It’s not in the archives.” She reaches forward between the seats and offers Alec a flash drive. “Maybe this will tell us what it means.” Alec takes the flash drive. “I did what seemed right,” Parker says. “Both for us and for her.”

Alec turns around and faces forward, the flash drive clasped loosely in one hand. He feels conflicted in the link, and Eliot sympathizes. He feels pretty conflicted himself.

He can’t get a read on how Parker is feeling about it.

He drives them home, all of them silent, and Eliot has the feeling that he should fix this somehow, that it’s dangerous for them to be in any way at odds, but he isn’t sure how.

“If the blood servant bond is anything like the link marks, the clan family would be able to track her,” he says finally. “And Parker is right. If she’s blood bound to the clan family, removing her from it might actually hurt her.”

“I held her mind in mine,” Parker says, sounding calmer now, almost thoughtful. “She is a normal little girl, if you take into account that normal for her includes living with vampires. She’s happy. She loves her father. She goes to a school and has friends there. Someone bites her once every couple of months, though she volunteers all the time. She wants to help support the clan like her father does, so she wants to donate blood far more often than they let her do it. And when they do it, they sip. She doesn’t realize it because she’s just a little kid, but they barely knick her and take a mouthful. For her, this is normal. She wants to be where she is.” 

She doesn’t say it, but Eliot can sense it so strongly that it’s almost in words. Parker envies her a little. Eliot had always known that Parker’s childhood had to be enormously fucked up, but he gets the sense that Parker at six or seven would have traded up for this little girl’s life in a hot second. Maybe Parker is more or less content with who she is now, but that doesn’t mean she’s forgotten everything she had gone through to get to that point.

Alec relaxes a little, resting his head against the back of the seat and closing his eyes. “It just _feels_ like a fucked up way for a kid to grow up,” he says.

“There are worse ways,” Parker says tonelessly.

Eliot feels the question trembling on the tip of Alec’s mind, and mentally slaps it away, making Alec jump a little, and turn an accusing look on him. Eliot doesn’t look back at him, just drives, but Alec doesn’t ask Parker any questions about her childhood, which is good enough for Eliot. He pulls the van into the tunnel and guides it down into the parking area, and turns the engine off.

Parker gets out first, still carrying her bag of weapons, and Alec turns a look on Eliot that is difficult to read in the uncertain light. Eliot can sort of feel it in the link though, a kind of questioning uncertainty, and says, “We have to trust her judgement. And I don’t know about you, Alec, but if I had to pick one of us to decide on whether or not a kid is living in a bad situation, I’d trust Parker’s assessment of the situation above my own in a heartbeat.” He doesn’t say why, but he can see enough of Alec’s face to see that Alec understands why. Slowly, he nods.

“I trust her judgement,” Eliot repeats, and he does. He doesn’t necessarily like it. He understands Alec’s reservations. But he believes Parker when she says the girl is safe and happy where she is, and that her life is more or less normal, given her living conditions. He also remembers holding Jairo’s mind in his and feeling and seeing his memories and emotions, which is something that Alec has never done. If he had, he would understand that there is no way to get anything but ungarnished truth from that kind of mind capture.

They get out of the van, and follow Parker inside. She has discarded her weapon bag and shrugged out of her harness. She says, “I would have taken her away if her life was bad.” She sounds weary again, and defensive, and feels a little hurt in the link. “I would have done it in spite of the fact that it would have screwed up the whole goal of the mission and that the whole clan family might have been able to track her down. I would have tried to find a place to hide her if I thought she needed hiding from them. Every member of that clan family dotes on her. She doesn’t need rescuing, Alec.”

Alec drops the flash drive next to his computer and goes to her, tugging her into his arms. “I believe you,” he says, and Eliot is more than a little relieved to feel that it’s true. Alec is still not comfortable with the situation, but he does trust Parker. “I can’t help my knee jerk response that leaving a little kid in a house full of vampires is somehow bad for the kid, but I didn’t touch her mind, and you have a better grasp on your mental abilities than I have anyway. But if you say she’s okay there, that she’s happy and safe, then I believe you. I will want to try to track her down and keep an eye on her because I can’t help being who I am, but I trust you. I trust you to know whether or not she needs rescuing. And you’re right. We don’t know anything about a blood binding between blood servants and their clan family. We didn’t even know it existed. It’s something we have to find out more about.”

“She’s lived with them since her mother abandoned her when she was three,” Parker tells Alec, her voice a little urgent, as though trying to convey everything she had seen or felt. “Her mother was… not a careful parent. She had boyfriends, and her memories from being that young are fragmented, but I think her mother might have had a drug problem. Alicia remembers going hungry and being alone a lot. She remembers a little about being someplace institutional for a few days. I think Child Protective Services probably had her. And then her dad found her. And every day of her life has been better for her since he did. They spoil her rotten, Alec. They play with her. They have tea parties.” Parker’s voice is actually a little pleading now. “They sit with her around her miniature table and chairs with her stuffed animals and toy tea pot and drink pretend tea with her. All of them. Her birthdays are like competitions. They all try to get her the best gift. She has a pony named Snickers.”

Alec’s grip around her goes tighter, and the slips his fingers into her hair and tugs her face against his chest, feeling almost protective in the link now, like he wants to shield Parker from something. “I trust you,” he says, and both sounds and feels certain in the link. “I trust you to make the right decision when you have more information than I do, Parker.”

Parker goes loose in his arms, leaning into his chest. “Taking her away would have been bad for us, but it would have been bad and scary for her. And the best we could hope to do for her was get her into the system, and she is better off where she is. I _know_. It took me almost a year to get out of the system, and I lived on the street for a while, and it was still better than being in the system.”

“It’s okay,” Alec says. “You don’t have to tell me, Parker. I believe you. I know you. You don’t have it in you to leave a child someplace you thought would be dangerous for her. I know that about you. It’s okay. I trust you.”

Parker sighs, and Eliot sees the tension bleed from the line of her shoulders. “You should still track her, though, if you can,” she says after several long, silent moments. “What she wants now might not be what she wants when she’s old enough to understand what she’s committing to. If we keep track of her, I can check up on her sometimes, just to be sure she is still happy. I can do it with just my eyes, if I’m only looking to get a glimpse into her mind, just a read on her emotional state. If she ever wants out, I’ll make sure she gets out. But for right now, she is safe and happy and we can only make her unhappy if we interfere.”

Alec strokes her hair. “I’ll find a way to track her, and we’ll keep tabs. Don’t worry about it. If she is safe and happy, we won’t do anything unless that changes.” Alec strokes her hair. “I trust you, Parker,” he says again, gently. “You did the right thing. I believe that.”

Parker turns a little in Alec’s arms and looks at Eliot. Eliot says, “I trust you. I don’t think you would leave a kid in a bad situation any more than Alec does. And I understand what it’s like to hold someone’s mind in my own. I _get_ that you can’t misunderstand or be confused about how they feel when you have someone held like that. There is no way to make mistakes about how they feel. Jairo is _happy_ as a vampire. I saw how they taught him to control his need for blood. I felt how he feels about his clan family, and he is happy with them. He feels lucky. He…” Eliot hesitates, still just the tiniest bit grieved about Jairo’s “good luck.” But the truth of it had all been there, laid out in his mind for Eliot to see. “I don’t know if I would have stopped it from happening to him if I knew about him then what I know about him now. For him, the change has been nothing but good, and he wasn’t happy before. I’m not sure, because if I’d known he was unhappy before, I would have tried to set him up doing something that would make him happy, but.” He shrugs. “It’s pointless to pretend that Jairo isn’t perfectly content to be a vampire. More than content. As far as he’s concerned, it’s the best thing to have ever happened to him. And… the two of you are the best things that have ever happened to me. Being a vampire hunter is dangerous, the things we need to find out about the Vampire Council, the possibility of opening up some kind of communication with them, finding out about the older Daywalkers and what their agenda is, how to stop it if stopping it feels like the right thing to do… all of that is nothing like what I thought I wanted. But I’m happy, even though it’s dangerous and complicated, even though we never know enough, even though we put ourselves at risk doing all of this shit… I wouldn’t give it up. I can’t judge Jairo for it without comparing it to my own life, and it’s just not that different, except, if anything, I think he’s a little safer than we generally are. But it’s worth it. If that child is content and well cared for, and I trust your ability to know that from her mind, then it isn’t even a matter of you doing the only thing you could. It’s a matter of you doing the right thing. I trust you to do the right thing, Parker.”

Eliot falls silent, dipping his head down for a second to escape the way the two of them are looking at him. He hadn’t meant for it to all spill out that way, and is a little embarrassed that it had, but it had all been true. And all he can feel from them is warmth and something low and soothing. When he looks back up, they have closed in on him without letting go of each other, and when they pull him into them, he lets himself lean into their embrace with fierce gratitude.

He hasn’t figured out how to tell them how he feels about them. Eliot has only been in love once, and it had been a long time ago. He had been young, and things hadn’t worked. He’s only said the words to one person, and even to that person, only a handful of times. If he ever does think of a way to tell them, he wants to make sure they understand that the link marks are part of it, but not even close to all of it. That he thinks the link marks had opened the possibility, but that even without them, he thinks he might have eventually come to this. Probably he never would have done anything about it, and would have spent enormous amounts of emotional resources not letting himself think about it, but if the link marks were to vanish tomorrow, it wouldn’t change how he feels about them now.

Parker, as wildly unpredictable as always, says, “I love you both.” A deep pulse of emotion flashes through the links as she says it, something that Eliot doesn’t fully understand, but get’s a little bit of, enough to think that it was hard for Parker to say, maybe _really_ hard, but that she had done it anyway. He isn’t sure why now, but he smooths a hand down her back, a careful gesture, the way you’d calm a skittish horse, and feels her settle just a little, which is something. She looks between them, a little frown line between her brows, and says, “Before all this, I wanted you both, you both treated me like I mattered, and I liked you both enough that I didn’t let myself do anything with either of you because I didn’t want anyone to be… left out. I’m not sure how either of you felt about me before, and you don’t have to tell me, but I always felt like having just one of you would not be… right, exactly. That it would leave one of you out, and I didn’t want anyone to be left out. I never really thought about trying to get you both, though. It never occurred to be that we might be able to be a threesome. I just never thought of it. Things are different and dangerous in ways that they weren’t before, but I wouldn’t trade it for what it was before. I can’t imagine losing the three of us together, and I know that I am not always easy to be with.” She looks away for a few seconds, her expression a little lost. “I never had a normal life, and I know that sometimes that makes things harder than they should be, to be with me, I mean. But I can’t change that. I can only do the best I can, and trust that one or both of you will tell me if I’m doing it wrong. But I promise you, I swear, that if I had looked into her mind and found anything that worried me, I wouldn’t have left her there, no matter how much damage it would have done to the plan. I know that I don’t always understand people, and that sometimes people don’t feel very real to me until I actually start to know things about them, but I promise…”

“We know,” Alec says, and kisses her temple and her cheek and then the corner of her lips. “Parker, I’m an asshole. My brain races along four or five tracks at once, and when there was suddenly a kid involved, all five tracks went to the worst possible destinations. That is _my_ bad, not yours. I know you wouldn’t put a child at risk. I shouldn’t have assumed I knew more about it than you, especially since you’d done the mental whammy on her. I’m just a person that automatically worries about other people, and I let that get out of control before I let you explain yourself. I’m sorry. And, putting all of that aside, I know it’s hard for you to talk about how you feel, and you just told us you loved us. And I feel guilty for not saying it first, because it’s never really been that hard for me to say how I feel, but I also feel so damned lucky that you are with us, and that you feel like you can say that to us. And, yeah, I love you both, and for what it’s worth, well. I thought Eliot was straight, so other than some jerk off fantasies, I didn’t put a lot of thought into a relationship with him -- sorry, Eliot -- but I always hoped you might notice at some point that I was working my way up to earning enough of your trust that you might say yes if I asked you out.”

Parker smiles a little. “I did notice. I just. It didn’t feel quite right.”

Eliot is pretty sure he doesn’t have to say anything, and neither of them will blame him for it. That there aren’t actual expectations of him here. But he’ll blame himself if he doesn’t admit to them what he’s known himself for months now. And if Parker can do it, then Eliot has no excuse for holding back.

“I was very careful to try to never think of either of you as anything but team mates,” he says slowly. “I didn’t always succeed, but I had a pretty good case of denial going on with both of you. Being in the Army makes you pretty good at practicing that kind of denial. I’ve only ever been in love once before, and it didn’t work out all that great. But if the link marks stopped working tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to let you go. I’m too old for both of you, and I have seen and done things I hope you never find out about, but I can’t help loving you. I feel like I could have loved either or both of you without the link marks, although I don’t know if I ever would have done anything about it. I don’t always feel like I deserve what we’ve got, but since I’ve got it, I’d fight hard not to have to give it up.” He realizes he’s staring down at his boots, and forces himself to look up at them. They are both smiling at him, gentle looks full of fondness. “If I can have the two of you, the rest of it doesn’t matter. We’ll find a way to work things out with the Vampire Council and the Daywalkers, and the dangerous shit hardly even factors in. I’ve always been doing the dangerous shit. I’ve… I’ve never had anything I’ve wanted to keep the way I want to keep the two of you,” he says, his voice low. 

Parker slides a hand up to the back of his neck and squeezes gently, her agile fingers easing the tension away in less than a minute. Eliot lets out a breath in a soft sigh, and Alec leans forward and rests his brow against Eliot’s for a long moment.

“We’re all good, then?” Alec asks.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, and turns to look at Parker.

“I’m good,” she says, gaze soft.

“Then it’s time to get to work,” Alec says. “I need to go over what’s on that flash drive. If I can divvy it up into chunks, and you’re both up to it, it’ll go faster if we all concentrate on it.”

Eliot shrugs. “I’m game.”

Parker says, “Let me change, and I’ll help.”

But they all three stand there for another handful of minutes, leaning into one another, and Eliot lets being with them just soothe him, and feels both of them doing the same thing, so doesn’t begrudge the time at all.


	35. Chapter 35

Eliot makes the good coffee while Alec plugs the flash drive into his laptop and sorts through the information Parker had downloaded. It’s already late, but after what they’d done to get the information, none of them seem inclined to let it sit and wait for morning.

Parker beams at him when he brings her a cup; she’s changed into a pair of yoga pants and a tank top, and he can see her sorting herself back into whatever passes for normalcy for Parker. He can even feel it a little, a slow dialing back of the intensity of emotion she had been putting out through the link, so that she feels calmer and steadier.

He takes Alec a cup, too, black and sweet, though if what they’re doing takes any length of time, Alec will probably switch to his revolting orange soda after just a cup or two. He splashes half and half liberally into his own cup, and sits on the couch with Parker to wait for Alec to tell them what they’ve managed to get. Parker turns sideways on the couch and tucks her bare feet under his thigh, wiggling her toes.

“We’ve got a lot of files here,” Alec says finally, leaning back in his chair and glancing over at the two of them. “Some of them I think are not what we’re really interested in. Like there are seven of them that are just tracking financial data. If we ever needed to run a con on them, we maybe could use it, but it’s not really what we’re looking for. Some of them, I’m not sure yet. The file names aren’t all that enlightening. But there are a few that I’m pretty sure we need to look through. The big one is Tractatus de Legibus, which I have just enough latin to know means something like Treaty of Laws. Then there is Tractatus de Secreto, which is something like Treaty or maybe Treatise of Secrecy. I checked the documents, by the way, and they’re in English. I’m guessing the Latin titles are just traditional. But then there are a couple of others, like Bloodlines and Lineage, which I can’t tell if we really need to know, but which it wouldn’t hurt to at least look through. And then there are some very specific ones, like, The Histories of the Children of Cain, which I’m pretty sure we want to know, and also Members of the Vampire Council, which obviously we want to know. There are also a couple of other files with Latin titles that I don’t know enough Latin to guess at what they mean, so I’ll hit up google translate for those before we start. But even without those, we’ve got a lot of information to go through. So, I know research is not on either of your short lists of favorite things to do, but if I do it all myself, it’s going to take forever. So who wants to look at what?”

“I’ll take the laws one,” Eliot says. “One of us should do the History one. Then next up would probably be the Members of the Vampire Council. Just to start with.”

“I’ll take the History,” Parker volunteers. “It sounds like the most interesting anyway.”

“I doubt we’re going to get anything super secret from a file on the Members of the Vampire Council that is available to all the vampires, but knowing even the basics of who they are and maybe where they are is better than nothing. So I’ll take that. The history file is pretty long, so it may take you a little while to get through that, Parker. The laws file is shorter, and the Vampire Council one is just a few pages. So Eliot, yell at me when you finish and I’ll have something else lined up for you to look at, and when I finish mine, I’ll start sorting through the ones that look like they might be promising. We’re looking at a couple of days of work here, probably.” Alec frowns a little. “Maybe less if some of these latin file names turn out to be nothing special. So no point in trying to get through all of it tonight, in case either of you were worried this was going to be a research cramming session. Take your time with it, and take notes.” He gives them a stern look. “There’s no point to doing it if you aren’t keeping track of the stuff that seems really important someplace other than just in your heads. People forget things or get distracted by other, more important seeming things.”

“Take notes, Jesus,” Eliot says disgustedly, but he accepts the notebook and pen that Alec hands him, and then passes note taking materials to Parker as well.

“So, do you want to do this off computer screens or should I start printing stuff out,” Alec asks. He looks disapproving about printing stuff out, but Eliot can feel himself perking up a little.

“If I have a printout, can’t I just use a marker to highlight the important things?” he asks.

“Eliot, I have a whole list of reasons why things shouldn’t be printed out that starts out with global climate change, but I’m gonna let it go just this once because this part is outside your comfort zone, so I’m willing to make it as easy for you as possible,” Alec says, and Eliot grins and drops his pen and notebook to the floor. Alec taps a few keys, and the printer starts up. Then he hands Eliot a pink highlighter marker. Alec looks at Parker.

“I can do it digitally,” she says. “Are they Word documents? Because if they are, I know how to use the notes function that let’s you add notes to the document.”

“Teacher’s pet,” Eliot says. She smirks.

“I’ll transfer it to a Word document,” Alec says, smiling at her. “The rainforests thank you.” Alec does some clicking on his keyboard, pulls the flash drive out of his laptop and plugs it into one of the spares, and clicks a few more times. Then he passes the laptop to Eliot, who passes it to Parker. She props it on her knees, her toes still wedged under Eliot’s thigh.

Alec gets up and collects the print outs and passes them to Eliot. “Don’t just highlight everything,” he says. “That will totally defeat the purpose.”

“Give me a little credit,” Eliot says, rolling his eyes, and flips through the hard copy. It doesn’t look unmanageable. It’s only about twenty pages.

It’s divided into two sections, the first being interesting reading, but not anything that applies directly to vampires and humans. It’s all about the way vampires are allowed to interact with other vampires. There are laws governing the claiming of Territory, especially in regards to claiming Territory already claimed by another vampire, and formal challenges between vampires, and inheritance rights regarding a Territory in which the Master of that Territory has “met with the sun” which Eliot assumes means has died in a definitive way. There are laws about how to break from a clan family in order to form a new clan family. There are laws about how many humans there have to be in a particular Territory to support a single vampire, which is interesting enough for Eliot to highlight. According to the laws, at least twenty thousand humans in an area is the smallest number necessary to support one vampire. The number seems high to Eliot, and he suspects it has to do more with keeping the vampires existence a secret than it does how many humans it takes to feed a vampire. He thinks he might look into the document about secrecy next, suspecting it might give details about why that particular number.

There are laws about how many vampires one is allowed to create, and laws about being responsible for those vampires, both financially, educationally, and literally, as in, if your vampire progeny goes on a killing spree, the vampire that created him or her is responsible for hiding it and, under most circumstances, killing said progeny. Eliot wonders why, with this law in place, there are any rogue vampires out there for the Daywalkers to hunt, and then thinks about the link marks, and what it might be like to have to kill someone you are link marked to. Maybe it’s easier to let the Daywalkers take care of it.

Then there are the laws about the ways vampires are allowed to interact with humans, and Eliot highlights a lot more.

Vampires are only allowed to kill humans under certain conditions, none of which include feeding on them. There is a one strike rule, though. A newly turned vampire within the first year of his or her vampire life, is allowed to make one mistake, one accidental death. There is punishment involved, though the document only says that the vampires clan family Master will punish the offender, not what that punishment is. But a new vampire is allowed one ‘accidental’ kill, allowed to lose control once and once only, and only during the first year. Otherwise, vampires are allowed to kill in self-defense, which Eliot assumes to mean that they are allowed to kill if the vampire comes up against a Daywalker, because it’s hard to imagine a normal human having the ability to actually kill a vampire. Though it doesn’t actually say that. It just says self-defense. Eliot wonders a little grimly how often that excuse is trotted out to justify killing a human. It seems like a catch all defense that a vampire guilty of killing a human can use if they can make the slightest case that indicates they might have been in danger.

A vampire can also kill a human if that human has physical proof that vampires exist that might threaten the Tractatus de Secreto. Eliot wonders a little about what kind of physical proof a human might be able to get their hands on that would expose vampires to the world at large. The only thing he can think of might be a body, if the human authorities managed to get the body at night, and thereafter keep it out of the sunlight. He’s not sure what a forensic examination of a vampire corpse might show, but it seems like almost the only thing that might really represent the danger of exposure.

And even then, the law is fairly narrow. If there is any possibility of using other methods to recover such physical evidence, those are supposed to be used before outright murder. Mind control abilities and superior physical powers, Eliot guesses, which seem like they would be more than enough to get the job done without actually having to kill any humans. But the law is there, maybe just in case.

And Daywalkers. A vampire is allowed to kill a Daywalker on sight, without fear of repercussion.

But that’s it. Killing humans outside of those relatively strict sets of circumstances is forbidden.

Eliot actually flips the last page over, looking for more, which is ridiculous, as the pages had only been printed on one side, but he’s surprised to find the laws regarding killing humans so strict, even as he feels a little thrill of hope and excitement at it.

He had known that the vampires that he and Alec and Parker had been killing had been operating outside of vampire law, that they’d fled the reservation, so to speak, but he still hadn’t expected, maybe hadn’t dared to hope, that the laws that actually govern when it is okay to kill a human would be so strict.

Obviously the laws don’t tell the whole story. If they did, the vampires themselves would have been taking care of the rogues the daywalkers hunt down, but he sort of understands that, too. Before they had left their clan families, those vampires had been some kind of odd combination of lovers and children to the vampires that had created them. They had a mental link to them that Eliot has to assume is on par with what he has with Alec and Parker, and the idea of either killing Alec or Parker, or even of declaring it open season on them to, for example, the other Daywalkers, is pretty much unthinkable. Eliot doesn’t think he would be able to do it. If Vampires feel for their progeny anything like what Eliot feels for Parker and Alec, it’s not hard to imagine them not being able to hunt them down and kill them for breaking vampire law, or even encouraging other vampires to do the same.

The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks that the Daywalkers are kind of a necessary part of vampire society, in spite of the fact that they can be killed on sight, because the vampires themselves are… he struggles a little with the idea, but finally lets himself think it (and maybe he can only do it because of Jairo, seeing him as a vampire and realizing that he isn’t that different than he had been before, that he isn’t completely inhuman now that he is a vampire). Maybe the vampires can’t help but still care for their progeny once they’ve gone rogue, and killing them is more than they are emotionally capable of doing. Maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe that’s granting the vampires a degree of humanity that is greater than what they actually have. But maybe it’s close.

He thinks of Parker telling them about the vampires of Ipsilon having imaginary tea parties with the human child of a blood servant, imagines them sitting at her child sized table, folding their adult sized bodies into the tiny chairs and sipping at imaginary tea from tiny cups. And she isn’t even link marked to them. Blood bound, which he is certain means something, represents some kind of semi-familial relationship, but not link marked.

And even the way that the vampires live. In what they themselves call clan families. As though families are important to them.

He sets his sheaf of papers aside and leans forward, elbows resting on knees, thinking.

What they have been doing -- killing the vampires that live outside the laws and destroying the nest -- combined with the information they have been absorbing from the Daywalker archives have been having a kind of double brainwashing effect on them, on the way they think of vampires. 

The laws the vampires have created themselves to live under are an odd mixture, as well. They treat one vampire challenging and killing another to take over his or her Territory as something almost commonplace, as though it isn’t unusual or even frowned upon, but almost wraps humans in a cocoon of protection by the very fact of the extremely few and very specific circumstances under which a vampire is allowed to kill one of them.

Eliot doesn’t think this mean that the vampires exactly _value_ humanity as a whole as much as he thinks that vampires recognize that if they ever were exposed, there are simply too many humans and not enough vampires. Humans would do whatever it took to eradicate an apex predator that preyed on humanity. They’ve done it to so many apex predators in the wild, already, and most of them don’t have the numbers to really be a threat anymore. Mountain lions and wolves and bears, even snakes that are particularly scary, and those last are rarely a threat to humans at all.

Vampires are hard to kill, but if it came down to humanity versus vampires, humanity would win.

He thinks of Hirota’s story. He wonders how old Hirota really is. He wonders at the _when_ of what Hirota had told him of his triumvirate. If Hirota had spent his life drinking from his vampire kills, he could be… well, almost any age at all. He wonders when Hirota’s triumvirate had cut its way through Japan’s undead community, destroying clan families and, he had said, even the Vampire Council itself, leaving behind just a few vampires, those that had hidden or had just gotten lucky. How without the support of their blood servants and clan families, those vampires had killed more humans than had been killed by vampires in years, prior to the purge of vampires Hirota’s triumvirate had initiated.

Vampires need Daywalkers.

They need them to hunt down the rogue vampires that refuse to live under the strict laws the rest of them abide by, because killing your lovers/children/family is too hard to do. They need them because the link marks make it almost impossible to abide by the law that says it’s the creator’s responsibility to destroy any progeny that breaks the laws.

They need Daywalkers, because the ones they choose to turn into vampires aren’t chosen because they are judged to be suitable in some way, or because they have some innate sense of self control that the vampires recognize and prize. They’re chosen because they are wanted, desired, or loved, they are maybe sometimes chosen because they have some sort of skill or ability a clan family believes it needs, but mostly, Eliot thinks, it’s more of the first than the second, and that means that the ones that they choose aren’t alway suited to being vampires. That they don’t have the control necessary to drink only as much as they need to live, and not as much as feels good or powerful or satisfying. 

The vampires need Daywalkers because they still have at least some of the flaws of regular humans, and they sometimes make bad choices, and when they do, they can’t alway bear to destroy what they created.

He glances over at Parker, who is absorbed in the laptop she’s working on, scrolling slowly down through lines of text, reading with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, chewing a little on her lower lip, her brows slightly furrowed. He imagines Parker losing it, really losing it, and becoming the most twisted and deadly version of herself. And he still can’t imagine killing her. 

“Alec,” he says, his voice a little hoarse. “Let me have the file on the Vampire Council next.”

Alec glances over his shoulder at him, a slight frown on his face, eyes a little clouded with concern, as though he hears or feels something from Eliot that doesn’t seem right. Eliot says, “It’s nothing bad, I’m just… surprised. The laws aren’t what I expected.”

“Surprised good, or surprised bad?” Alec asks, clicking through some of the files and then selecting one to print out.

“A little of both,” Eliot says. 

Parker looks up, blinking a little. She wiggles her toes under his thigh. “Okay?” she asks.

“Yeah. I just. I want to know about the Council, because I think we have to try to make contact. I think.” He shakes his head. “We’ll pow-wow about it when we all need a break from reading or something. But yeah, I want to know about who is on the Council and how it’s set up while I think about what we would need to do to safely start some kind of interaction with them. I think it’s important.”

Alec gives him a long look, but just nods, and brings him over a half a dozen printed pages. “I don’t know what you’re going to get from these, though,” he says. “I’ve glanced over it, and it’s not detailed. It’s more than bare bones information, but it doesn’t really reveal anything about them. I think it’s mostly just there so that the new vampires know who their ultimate bosses are.”

“Yeah, but if I can get any kind of feel for one of them at all, we can try to research him or her. And maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’m just trying to get a feel for the Council as a whole. Maybe when we contact them, it will be all of them at once. For now, I’ll take what I can get and do what I can with it.” He shrugs one shoulder. “If you can track it down, I really need to know what the pact was between the Daywalkers and the Vampires before it went to hell. I don’t know if it will be in these files at all, but you said some of the file names were in Latin. Maybe translate those and see if anything sounds like it might be what we’re looking for.”

“I can save you the trouble,” Parker says. “Or some of it, anyway. The history doesn’t give all the details of the pact, but there is some stuff about it. You want to read it? I highlighted it all. Or I can just summarize.”

“Yeah, just tell me,” Eliot agrees, and takes a drink of his stone cold coffee.

“Let me get more coffee,” Parker says, and sets her laptop on the coffee table.


	36. Chapter 36

Eliot takes advantage of the pause to refill his own coffee and to get up and stretch. When Parker settles back down on her end of the couch, she waits until Eliot sits, and shoves her toes under his thigh again.

She is silent for a minute or so, as though sorting through what she wants to say, and then she starts talking.

“Okay, so the Sun walkers were first documented in the histories about three thousand years ago, which is to say, that’s when vampires realized there were some humans out there that had some vampire abilities when they were exposed to vampire blood. The vampires at the time caught one of them, and...I don’t want to say experimented on him, because that implies that they in some way hurt him, and from what I can tell, other than holding him prisoner and having him fight some vampires so that they could judge his abilities, they didn’t hurt him in any way. Eventually, they let him go, after negotiating with him the _Foederis Solis_ , the Pact of the Sun, which said that he was free to hunt down vampires that didn’t obey vampire law. This was the very limited first draft of the _Foederis Solis_ , by the way. There was another version of it later, that was a bigger deal. But anyway, this one Sun walker -- I don’t know if he was a regular Daywalker or if he was part of a triumvirate, the history doesn’t mention others with him, but,” She shrugs a little. “Histories are never really as complete as they could be. Anyway, he was sort of… attached to the Vampire Council in Greece. A couple of years after this guy was found, some other vampires in other parts of the world found Sun Walkers of their own, and for the most part, they all did the same thing for the vampires. This was mostly in the Mediterranean and in Europe, and there was some communication between the Vampire Councils that ruled the various geographic areas, so after the Greek Vampires told the other Councils about the Sun Walker, they started looking around for ones of their own. It doesn’t say exactly that, but that’s the impression I get. Some of the language in this thing is kind of archaic. Anyway, this Sun Walker in Greece was sort of a part of the Vampire Council. The main thing he did was track down and kill -- there is some latin for it, but I don’t know how to pronounce it -- but the translation is ‘oath breakers’, because all new vampires were required to take oaths to obey all the vampire laws. If a vampire went nuts, and broke his oath, the Sun Walker took care of it so that the vampires didn’t have to kill the ones they created. Also, sometimes really old vampires go crazy, they call it _detrimentum sui_ , which means loss of self, and the Sun Walker would take care of them, although these old ones were really powerful, so sometimes he’d need help from the Vampire Council to take them down. That wasn’t all he did, though. He helped the vampires make laws that would let them hide from the humans, which included a lot of changes in the way that humans were treated by vampires, basically making sure that the law didn’t allow for vampires to feed on a human until he or she died, which they had all been doing up until that point. It made it so that the vampires had to feed more frequently, but it left the blood donor alive afterward. The history isn’t too clear on why the vampires let him change their laws this way. And it doesn’t give his name. But he was supposedly really wise, and was committed to the idea that vampires and humans could both live alongside one another as long as they followed the rules and kept themselves secret. Anyway, that was the first Pact of the Sun, which happened in 898 B.C. The second Pact of the Sun happened in 1190, and now I’m really reading between the lines here, because nowhere in this history is a Sun Walker triumvirate mentioned, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. This happened in Paris, which was going through a political and religious upheaval at the time. According to the history, the Vampire Council in Paris, which was called something else, but that’s what it was, had several Sun Walkers attached to it, but there were a few that were stronger than the others, and these few had the same responsibilities to the vampires as they always had, but also were the first to offer the vampires their blood to make them stronger. This happened because there was a group of vampires from ‘the east’ -- I get the idea they were from the area that would now be Russia -- that had come in and challenged France’s Vampire Council, and the challengers didn’t follow vampire law. They thought vampires were better than humans, and that they could and should basically do whatever they wanted, killing people and taking over their lands and holding people in thrall with their mind powers and basically becoming despots. There were several of them, though the history doesn’t actually say how many, but a group, and they sort of tore through Europe, though it seems like they were mostly occupied with France, maybe because the vampires there were fairly spread out, except for places like Paris, which had more concentrated numbers of Vampires. Anyway, the invaders were winning, controlling at one point about a quarter of the east of France. Now keep in mind that the law abiding vampires basically lived off a subsistence level of blood, just what they needed to live. The vampires that were trying to take over were stronger physically, harder to kill, although the regular vampires were mentally stronger and were more… I’m not sure, it was like they had the ability to keep their people united and determined, they were better leaders, smarter and with more tactical minds. When the invaders from ‘the east’ challenged the French Council, the strongest of the Sun Walkers let the Council drink their blood, and drank the Council’s blood in return, and it made both groups stronger, so that in the end, they were able to defeat the invaders and recover the territory they had lost. This took a few years, it didn’t happen overnight, but it was obvious that trading blood made both sides stronger, and that is why the second Pact of the Sun got made, which didn’t change much from the first pact of the Sun, except that it formalized the exchange of blood between the strongest of the Sun Walkers and the Paris Vampire Council. Eventually, the change got around to other parts of the world and became the norm.” Parker pauses for a long moment to gulp down some of her coffee. She sighs appreciatively, and says, “This really is the best coffee. So that’s more or less what happened. I haven’t got to the part where the pact breaks down,” she says, almost apologetically. “I’m still in the 1200’s, when the territory borders that still exist today in most of the world -- not counting the Americas and Mexico, which didn’t really have vampires yet -- were still being squabbled over.”

“No, that’s great, Parker, basically what I wanted to know aside from also wanting to know how it went wrong. Let me know as soon as you get to that part,” Eliot says, feeling a little revived, and a little like he might want to read the whole history itself at some point, but mostly feeling like he’s sure about the vampires needing the Daywalkers and that in the past, the vampires and the Daywalkers had known that, too, and had worked together.

“Oh, and one of the other things the Sun Walkers did,” Parker says, waving one hand a little in an almost cutting motion, “or, more like the _reason_ the Sun Walkers did what they did, was because sometimes if a vampire killed his or her own progeny when they broke their oaths, they went temporarily crazy. I’m going to guess that the link marks are why, that killing someone you’re link marked to causes a kind of feedback or backlash or something, because of that mental connection. My point being, that it isn’t just hard for a vampire to kill their own progeny, it’s dangerous for them to do it, which is what, aside from their efforts to make sure the vampires and humans could co-exist more or less peacefully, made the Sun Walkers so important. The death of a vampire another vampire is link marked to is supposed to be pretty traumatic either way, but if they actually did it themselves, like the law says they have to because they’re responsible for what their progeny does, isn’t just hard, but is actually dangerous, and could cause the creator to temporarily lose it. If it was a clan family Master, it often destabilized or even destroyed the clan, and instead of one vampire going off and killing a half a dozen people, you had an older, more powerful vampire, or even a Master vampire, that just totally lost control, sometimes killing all of his own clan family, sometimes going out and slaughtering humans, but either way, you know, bad news. The Sun Walkers kept the vampires from having to kill their own, and for the vampires, at least according to the histories, this was such an important service that the Sun Walkers themselves made the ultimate decisions on whether or not vampire law had been broken and a vampire had to be ‘given to the sun.’”

Eliot nods slowly. “Okay, that makes a lot of sense, too. Thank you.” And it does make a lot of sense. The idea of having to kill Alec or Parker is almost impossible to even consider, but also that there would be backlash from the marks… It seems so obvious that he feels like he should have figured it out on his own.

Parker shifts the laptop on her knees to the coffee table and gets up, stretching, arms held up to the sky, back arched, her head rocked back, and then settles back into a more normal posture. She yawns. “More coffee?” she asks Eliot, as she picks up her own mug.

“Would be so great,” Eliot says, leaning forward and hearing his back crackle in a series of low pops. He retrieves his mug and hands it over to her.

“Alec?” she asks.

“Hmm? Uh, oh, no. I’ll get a soda in a minute,” he says absently, scrolling rapidly and not looking away from his computer screen. “Thanks, though,” he adds after a moment.

Parker brings Alec a soda, probably knowing just like Eliot does that he’ll forget if he’s really absorbed in what he’s doing, and refills her own coffee, and remembers to add half and half to Eliot’s. Eliot is grateful because it cools it off enough that he can down half the cup in one long, satisfying gulp.

“Thank you,” he says, and she grins at him and settles down on her end of the couch again.

“Can I put my feet in your lap?” she asks, and Eliot lifts up the sheets of paper he’s only holding, hasn’t even looked at yet, and makes room for her feet.

She sighs happily as she stretches her legs out all the way, though she’s careful where she lets her feet come to rest, which is another thing Eliot is grateful for. An accidental kick to the groin is something this night definitely does not need.

She sips at her coffee for a long moment, cupping the mug in both hands, not immediately going for the laptop again.

“I got some idea of the laws from the history,” she says, and her eyes are starting to look a little sleepy, but her voice still sounds mostly alert. “What was it about them that surprised you?”

“That there are so few instances in which it’s okay to kill a human,” Eliot says. “Like, I think there are three, and two of them are conditional. I had guessed that generally the law said not to kill humans, but I expected them to give the vampires a little more leeway than they do. But it all makes a lot more sense, given what you explained from the histories. And the part about them going crazy if they kill their own progeny. I just. I had started to suspect that they need us, but knowing _why_ they need us helps frame it a lot. Knowing what happened to fuck up the pact is the next step. Once I know that, we can start talking about ways that we might be able to fix it.”

“It’s going to be tricky,” Parker says. “With the Daywalker archive being available to people, changing how they perceive vampires means changing the archive, and Hirota seemed to be saying that there were older Daywalkers out there, probably a triumvirate, like us, that are controlling what gets put on the archive.”

Eliot sips at his coffee. “I know. I’ve been thinking about it, but I only have one idea about it so far, and I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

She arches her brows at him in question.

He shifts one shoulder in a very slight shrug. “Have Alec hack the archive and find out where it physically is. Go to the source and confront whomever is hosting it. It might be pointless. Whomever it is might be as clueless as we are at who puts information up. But someone has administrative control over the archive, because there are areas where you can chat and areas where you can add stuff to the archive, but you can’t access and edit all areas of the archive. Some of it we can’t change or edit. Which means it’s possible that whomever actually hosts the archive will either be the person or persons that have that access, or will know who they are.”

Parker’s expression is inscrutable. “May work. May not. Do you really think the three of us have any kind of chance at forming some kind of working relationship with the vampires?”

Eliot rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know. It depends on a lot of variables. Not the least of which being if anyone on the Vampire Council remembers having the Daywalkers as allies. The fact that it’s in the histories is a positive sign, though. They remember that we worked together once.”

“Depends a lot on how the pact was broken,” Parker says. “If a Sun Walker betrayed them… Well, I just get the feeling that the vampires aren’t forgive and forget types.”

Eliot silently agrees with her. “The history may not say,” he says, abruptly remembering something Jairo had said. “I asked Jairo what kind of pact the vampires had with the Sun Walkers, and he didn’t really know. So if you’re reading the same history he did, you got a lot more out of it than he did.”

“But I know about the link marks the triumvirates, and a lot of that was reading between the lines, Eliot. Some of it was right off the page, like the dates and the Latin, but some of it was putting two and two together. Like, it doesn’t say in the history that the reason the Sun Walkers were so vital was because killing their own progeny sometimes drove a vampire temporarily out of their mind. It said in another place that it sometimes drove them crazy, and I connected the dots. Besides that, Jairo is twenty-five, has had something huge and life changing happened to him very recently, and was assigned to read this history so that he knows where vampires came from and what happened to them. I’m betting he didn’t read it from the same angle that I’m reading it from, and that there may be huge chunks of it that he doesn’t remember because they didn’t seem that important to him.” She is giving Eliot a very serious look, and feels very focused through the link. “He probably read it like he would have read assigned chapters in a history class in college, and will remember about as much of it as he remembers of that. What did he say he remembered about Daywalkers?”

Eliot thinks about the conversations with Jairo for a long moment, and then answers, “ I asked him what he knew about Daywalkers, and he said he knew that they hunted vampires, though that mostly they were safe from them because they only hunted rogues. He said that that histories said the Council and the Sun Walkers had a pact. I asked him what kind of pact, and he said he wasn’t sure. He said he didn’t think all the details got transcribed into the database or that maybe he didn’t remember them, just that they used to work together. He called them Sun Walkers and said that they would let the vampires drink their blood, and the vampires would let them drink theirs, and the they would all grow stronger.” Eliot ponders, trying to remember exactly what Jairo had said. “Then he said the something went wrong, and now the Daywalkers only live to hunt down the vampires that don’t live by the laws, and that sometimes they got one of the ones that do because the Daywalkers can’t tell the difference anymore. I’m pretty sure that was it.” 

Parker nods. “None of it is wrong, but he only remembers the basics. I’m reading this _looking_ for clues. He was still trying to learn how to be a vampire. Probably some of it got lost in translation, too. The language really is pretty archaic. The closer I get to the present day, the less archaic it get’s, actually. At the beginning, it was a little bit like reading something out of the Bible.”

“Huh,” Eliot says thoughtfully. “Maybe this isn’t all that important to what we’re doing, but I’m curious. Where do they come from. What does the history say about how vampires started?”

“It’s actually pretty interesting and a little alarming, if it’s true,” she says, smiling a little. “According to the vampires, they are the sons and daughters of Cain, born after he had been marked by God as untouchable. That Cain wandered the earth for ‘a hundred hundred years’ -- see what I mean about the language, how much time is a hundred hundred years, really? -- and that eventually he found the path back to Eden. It was closed to him, but along the path was a cave, and in the cave was Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was supposedly made at the same time as Adam and from the same clay, and who eventually left the Garden of Eden because she would not be subservient to Adam. None of this is in the Bible, but I did a couple of myth and lore searches and found lots of references to Lilith. In a lot of them, she’s demonized, as well. So in some, she was Adam’s first wife who left him, in some, she’s a demon, and in some she is both, because God cursed her for leaving Adam. The histories just refer to her as Adam’s first wife, they don’t say anything about her being a demon. But Cain found her living in a cave, and they were both cursed by God, and when they lay together, their children were night creatures, which, by the way, in Hebrew, is the actual translation of the word Lilith. At any rate, the vampires believe they are the sons and daughters of Cain and Lilith, and are cursed by God in a big way because of their parents both being cursed by God. That’s their explanation of why holy objects react to them, though it doesn’t explain why holy items of any faith seem to work, rather than just those based in Christianity. If it’s true, it’s a hell of an origin story. The story says that Lilith sustained them on her own blood for ‘age upon age’ and that Cain would go out and hunt people for them when there were too many of them for Lilith to sustain alone. Now Lilith and Cain’s first children, the ones born of her body, were babies like any others and had to grow up, but eventually, once Cain got tired of hunting humans for them I guess, and told them to ‘go forth and claim a place upon the earth’ one of them, whose name was Inona, didn’t quite kill the human she had hunted, and when she was sated and insensible, he bit her back and drank her blood, and when she woke up she found him ‘as a ravening beast for a quarter of a moon’ and for reasons of her own, kept him, feeding him her own blood and the blood of those she hunted to feed herself, and he eventually became sane again, and… “ She pauses and wrinkles her nose, her gaze growing a little distant as though she’s trying to remember exactly what he’d read. “‘Their union marked them both with power and bound them together as if with one mind.’ I’m guessing this was the first link mark. And because she was either curious or lonely, she went out and found a few more humans and she and he formed the first clan family, all of which ‘bore her mark upon them, and shared power with her’, and she named it Caine after her father -- and don’t ask me why, but that is Caine with an e on the end, even though Cain is just C-A-I-N when it refers to her father -- and over the course of ‘a dozen dozen’ lifetimes… what, Eliot?” Parker asks, pausing, as Eliot had jerked a little in surprise at the name of the clan family.

“That’s Jairo’s clan family name,” Eliot says. “Caine with an e.”

“That’s not actually that big a surprise,” Parker says. “The name of the clan family is chosen by the vampire that starts it, and they range kind of wildly in how they’re named. A lot of vampires use their own last names, but not all by any means. And I’m betting there are a lot of clan families that use Caine as their name, both as a kind of nod to history and also as a claim to power.” She looks thoughtful. “Hey, Alec?”

“One second,” Alec says, his keyboard click-clacking as he types. It’s actually more like a minute, and then he stops what he’s doing and turns around to look at Parker. 

“Can I get the Bloodlines and Lineage document?” she asks, and passes him her laptop. Alec had apparently been at least half listening to what they had been talking about, because he doesn’t ask her why, just swaps the flash drive out from his laptop to hers and downloads the file with a couple of clicks. He hands the laptop back to her.

“If the vampires are really the spawn of two people cursed by God at what is pretty much the beginning of time,” Alec says, “then it’s impossible to guess how old some of them might be or what kind of powers they might have. Just in case no one has thought about that.”

Eliot thinks about that for a moment, a feels a little chill run down his spine.

“The History kind of covers that, too,” Parker says a little absently, as she is talking while she clicks on her laptop and scrolls through what is presumably the Bloodlines and Lineage document, scanning it quickly. “They get unstable eventually, and have to be ‘given to the sun’ according to the histories. “Or sometimes the old ones ‘go to earth’ which I suspect means that they… hibernate? Apparently they did this a lot more often early on, and now go crazy more often than they ‘go to earth.’ The history doesn’t give any specific ages on how old they are when this kind of thing happens to them, though. Not enough for me to even guess at. The stuff in the beginning says things like ‘after a thousand thousand nights’ which is i guess like the 40 years in the desert thing that the Bible does, which is basically supposed to mean: ‘nobody knows how long it was, but it was a really long time.’ I read that somewhere, that that was what the 40 years in the desert really meant, but I can’t remember where. Anyway, the newer stuff just doesn’t give ages at all. References to them just say things like, so and so, who was old when the world was still young, ran mad, and was hunted and ‘given to the sun’ by the Sun Walkers and the Masters of this region or that region. So I don’t even know. I wonder a lot about that, though. About how old the really old ones are for real, and what they can do. I want to know, but I’m also kind of freaked out at the idea at the same time. Ah, here.” She stops scrolling. “Portland is apparently in the Territory of Rafael Ansuro Lucas Vicario, of clan family Vicario, who controls ‘the western United States from the border of Canada to the border of Mexico, east to the Dakotas and south to the southern border of Utah, not including Arizona or Wyoming.’ You’d think there would be a shorter name for it. I guess it’s important for your Territory names to be specific to avoid challenges.”

“That is a huge chunk of the country,” Alec says, looking surprised. “How many Territories are there in the U.S.?”

Parker scrolls. “Eight. Florida is all by itself. Alaska is all by itself. Texas is by itself. Hawaii is apparently shared neutral Territory. Otherwise all of these are named like that. The southeastern United States from east of the Mississippi River to the southern border of Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, not including Florida. Things like that. How many Council Members are there, Eliot?” she asks.

Eliot shuffles through the pages he’s holding. “Seven,” he says finally. “They all list their Territories, too. I’m betting they’re all the Masters of a specific Territory within the country, and there are only seven instead of eight because of Hawaii. And because if you have a Council, it only makes sense to have an odd number of people on it.”

“Anyway,” Parker says, with a handwave, “the city of Portland is home to sixteen clan families, which it lists in order of prominence, and Master of the City is Gabriel Romero Vega of clan family Caine.”

“What does it mean that we have a Master of the City and a Master of the Territory?” Alec asks. “Is it just that the Master of the Territory has delegated the responsibility for the city to a different vampire?”

“Hang on,” Parker says, “I’m looking up Gabriel’s lineage.” She scrolls and squints at the screen for a while, and makes a soft humming noise. “Okay, so Gabriel Romero Vega is the secondary heir to the Territory that Rafael Ansuro Lucas Vicario controls, so if anything ever happened to Vicario, Vega would be second in line to inherit control of the entire Territory. And yes, in high population density areas, it’s not uncommon to have Masters of the City to govern the day to day antics of clan families. Portland is really only just big enough to have one. I think if Vega didn’t lair here, and he wasn’t Vicario’s secondary heir, Portland probably wouldn’t have a Master of the City in place. It’s not even human population density, it’s vampire population density. Sixteen clans is not that many, really, and if there were no Master of the City, the heads of each clan would rule by council, more or less, though it’s less ruling and more just oversight. They’re like the manager. Vicario is the owner of the company, but he owns a big company, and lairs in Los Angeles, so it only makes sense for him to put people he trusts in other high population areas to oversee that things are getting done the way he wants them to. Although to be fair to our Master of the City, his Territory includes six other clan families that lair in other places outside the city, but close enough for him to be able to influence them. So it’s more like he’s Master or Portland and surrounding areas, though without the same kind of strict geographic boundaries that the principal Territories in the country adhere to. There isn’t another Master of the City in Oregon at all, so he’s probably also a troubleshooter, which means he would go anywhere in the state that a clan family was set up that had a problem of some kind. There are a few clan families in a couple of the bigger cities in the state, but most of the state is pretty clear of vampires. Not enough people. But his lineage shows that he’s around seven hundred years old, and can trace his bloodline back to the literal Cain. He’s actually older than our Master of the Territory. I don’t know what that means as far as power levels go. Maybe he’s just not ambitious. But he’s old. Probably pretty powerful. According the the histories, tracing boodlines backward gets pretty murky and hard to prove the further back you go, so I guess we should just take from that that he is powerful enough to claim to have a fairly close connection to Cain. Of course, all of them eventually trace back to him, if the origin story is true, but it’s a matter of degree. How many vampires are between you and Cain. Gabriel claims only seven.”

Parker yawns hugely and then looks a little startled.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, shuffling the pages he’s still holding without looking at him. “I think it’s bedtime.” He glances at Alec, who is still sitting facing them, but is looking longingly back over his shoulder at the document he’d been working on. “For me and Parker anyway,” he says. “We’re not used to mainlining orange soda and gummy frogs for forty-eight hours straight.”

“No, I’ll come, too,” Alec says. “I’m not leaving anything hanging except for the fact that there’s a lot to look at so something is inevitably going to be left hanging even if I do stay up until I fall over.” He twists around in his chair and saves and closes his document. Parker taps at her laptop a few times and then closes it, sliding it onto the coffee table.

Eliot puts the papers in his hand on top of the stack of the pages of vampire law.

He thinks he may be too full of new information to sleep, but when the three of them get themselves arranged into bed in the usual way, he is asleep almost the moment he closes his eyes.


	37. Chapter 37

For two days they pour through everything Parker had downloaded. Some of it is obviously not what they’re looking for, although if they have to pull some kind of financial scam on the Vampire Council, they now have enough information to do it. Some of it is more information than they really need, such as the Bloodline and Lineage document, which seems to list every vampire in the United States along with their pedigree. It might be useful to have in some cases, but it doesn’t really convey much information, aside from sheer numbers. Maybe it isn’t more than they need though, because they come back to it from time to time to check out what it says about the vampires in their city, their clan families, their status as heirs or their lists of blood servants.

Parker finally finds two things in the histories they’ve been looking for. One is what a blood bonded blood servant means. The other, is, of course, the breaking of the Pact of the Sun.

Blood bonded blood servants are explained near the end of the history. Vampires had always known that having a human drink from them extended their life spans and granted them a moderate increase in strength and speed. It had to be done regularly, and it was not on par with what a Daywalker gained from drinking from a vampire. None of the mental gifts exhibit, and maybe a quarter of the physical gifts. 

Near the end of the 1500’s, the Master of the Lafayette clan family had discovered that if the blood servant drank from every member of a clan family, the blood servant became blood bound to the family itself. That blood servant aged even more slowly, and also gained a fraction of a link mark, though with no actual visible mark. Instead, maybe it was more like a one way link mark. The Master of the clan family gained the ability to sense the blood servant, get a limited sense of his thoughts, and a deeper sense of his loyalty to the clan family. The blood servant did not gain any of those abilities, but blood binding a blood servant became integral to the way a clan family was run due to that last little ability, the ability to sense a blood servant’s loyalty. There had always been a few cases of blood servants betraying their clan family, some in small ways, theft or other such petty crimes, but a few times blood servants had gone rogue in a much different way than a vampire might go rogue. These had slain their clan families in their lairs while they slept during the day, or had burned down the clan families home while they slept. The vampires had never been able to capture and question a blood servant who turned on their clan family. They inevitably killed themselves either with or directly after killing the vampires they had served. The history speculates that those few incidents of blood servants going mad were not that different from extremely old vampires going mad, the _detrimentum sui_ , or ‘loss of self,’ only that in humans it did not happen because of age, but due to some other factor that the vampires couldn’t pinpoint without a living witness or more cases to compare. It is documented in the histories maybe a total of a dozen times -- which meant that there were probably more cases that went undocumented -- but in spite of the relative rarity of the occurrences, when the ability to blood bond a human servant was discovered, it was immediately adopted almost universally, which gave the impression, at least, that it was something that vampires in general had some fear regarding.

Parker suggests that if you are, for all intents and purposes, completely helpless during the daylight hours and dependant on your human servants to keep you safe, even only a dozen cases over the course of a few hundred years would be enough to worry you.

Eliot doesn’t necessarily disagree.

The breaking of the Pact is not as simple, and is moderately awful.

In 1374, in Rome, a vampire claiming to be Samael, a direct son of Cain and Lilith, who had ‘risen again after going to ground’ some two thousand years before, descended on the city and went about challenging and killing the members of the Italy’s Vampire Council until he controlled the Territories of all of them. This did not directly violate vampire law, though it violated long custom. But as long as a vampire could control all of the Territory that he claimed, it wasn’t considered against the law, and according to the histories, he could. He was more powerful than the most powerful of vampires on the Council by whole orders of magnitude. He could control the minds of multiple vampires as easily as other vampires could control the minds of humans. He challenged and claimed all of Switzerland and Austria, before turning his attention toward France, which had a relatively large vampire population, and it was looked like he didn’t intend to stop until he was in control of the entire continent, if not the entire civilized world. 

Half of the vampire population considered him to be their rightful monarch, as a direct descendant of Cain and Lilith, the rest considered him an abomination, a real threat to vampire civilization as it had evolved.

He followed vampire law, with the exception of the Sun Walkers, which he declared to be outlawed in his Territory, and he drained them dry whenever he came across them. The Vampire Council in France declared him to be too powerful to be allowed to continue to claim Territory, a threat to the Treatise of Secrecy, and also outlaw, because of his slaughter of Sun Walkers, who were human, whatever powers they possessed, and thus protected. Three of the five Territories in Spain declared that they would surrender all Territory to him and accept his rule. England followed France’s lead. Most of Germany was prepared to be taken under his rule. 

Before he could make his way to France, the strongest of the Sun Walkers in the European area that could make the journey in time banded together and quite literally cast him into the sun. He was so strong that he survived it, half-ablaze and crazed with pain, and the Sun Walkers bound him down with crosses in broad daylight in the streets of Rome, and basically hacked him into pieces, and then stood around the body until the sun consumed it and they were sure he would not rise again.

Those that had considered the son of Cain and Lilith to be the rightful monarch of all of vampire-kind called for the deaths of the Sun Walkers responsible. Those that considered him an abomination declared that the Sun Walkers had not upheld the Pact when they had not interfered with his original challenges and had allowed Italy, Switzerland, and Austria’s Councils to fall. Both sides demanded the Sun Walkers be brought to justice (albeit for different crimes), and the Sun Walkers that had actually killed Samael, son of Cain and Lilith, were hunted down and killed. When the few Sun Walkers left in Europe heard what had been done, they walked away. They had never been numerous, though for two thousand years they had held great sway in the world of the vampires. But in the span of only a few weeks, the vampires the Sun Walkers had done their best to protect and help govern had turned on them, not just one side, but both, and the handful of Sun Walkers left simply detached themselves from all of the Vampire Councils in all Territories across Europe, and disappeared. There is a stretch of a couple of hundred years in the history in which no Sun Walkers are even discussed. When they appear in the histories again, they acted more or less as present day Daywalkers do, but they had lost their cohesiveness as a body. They worked alone, hunting rogues and those that didn’t abide by vampire law, and occasionally making mistakes and killing those that did. They had lost much of their knowledge of their own history and the history of the vampires, according to the vampire history, which does not state how it had come by that knowledge. 

They were deemed to be dangerous, and eventually the law was changed so that Sun Walkers were among the humans it was permissible to kill.

Many of the older vampires that remembered working with Sun Walkers lobbied for them to be approached and given the opportunity to resume their former roles, but those that had never worked with Sun Walkers directly opposed that course, some still citing that the Sun Walkers had broken the pact, either by killing the son of Cain and Lilith, or by not stopping him before he conquered several countries, and that schism in the vampire view of the world seems like it has never fully closed. There was never an official war declared between vampires that supported Samael and those that believed he had to be destroyed, but strong new alliances were forged and many old alliances were broken over dissenting viewpoints, and there were a few skirmishes.

When reading through the history itself for this information, it’s clear that whoever had written it had tried to merely report the facts, without coming down on either side of the issue, but the prose slants slightly toward the writer thinking that Samael was dangerously powerful and potentially unstable. 

When Parker goes over it with them, she does it grimly, and she’s only halfway through when Eliot understands why. This is one hell of a hurdle for establishing any kind of relationship with the vampires of the present day. At least some of them that had been alive then were probably still alive, and that meant overcoming prejudices that had been formed over real events, not just over words in a history. He wonders about their own Master of the City. He’s old enough, just barely, to have been alive. There’s no telling where he had been or what he had been doing while this was going on. Chances are, if he was very young, he wasn’t in a position of power, but still. His clan family would have come down on one side or the other of the issue, and he likely would have felt about it however they had felt about it.

If they’re going to approach someone, it might be important to know which someone to approach first. In the end, both sides had betrayed the Sun Walkers, really, but if they approached a vampire that had been alive at the time and had supported Samael, son of Cain and Lilith, as the rightful monarch of all vampires, they were likely to be rejected out of hand.

The list of members of the Vampire Council, though, is at least a little be encouraging. Vampires had only slowly come to settle the New World, and with the Bloodline and Lineages document, it’s clear that most of the members of the United States Vampire Council are too young to have been a part of the original schism Samael’s appearance and then abrupt death had caused. They may still have opinions, but they are unlikely to think of it… personally.

Eliot is surprised to find that he’s more than a little outraged on behalf of those Sun walkers, dead now for seven centuries. He knows where he would come down on the issue; a vampire that powerful could not be allowed to take and hold that much territory. A being that old would almost certainly obey the laws only until it was within his power to change them to suit himself, and Eliot doubts that any changes that he would have made would have been good ones for humanity as a whole.

There is also some hope that not all of his supporters still believe so wholeheartedly that the vampires as a race should have deferred to him. The law, as it now reads, allows that a vampire may only control one Territory at a time. That any vampire that controls a Territory that chooses to challenge a vampire of another Territory for control of it, gives up all rights to their original Territory to their heir. A vampire might still choose to do so if he were absolutely sure of his heir’s loyalty, once said heir was a Master of a Territory in his or her own right, to build up a larger power base, but it is no longer a matter of being allowed to hold all that you can take and control. The Territories had been legally established in the 1500’s in Europe, and a little later in New World, but they were a few centuries old here, too, and while there had been challenges for Mastery of a Territory over the last couple of hundred years in The U.S., none of them had come from those that already held Mastery over another Territory. They had all come from below. And none of them had been successful. The U.S. Vampire Council was stable, as far as such things went. Those vampires that had originally fought it out for control over certain regions and had come out on top were still in power.

If they were to attempt to communicate with the vampires, should it be to the Master of the City? The Master of the Territory? The Council as a whole?

And what do they have to offer? They can’t speak for the rest of the Daywalkers, obviously, and the three of them aren’t enough to handle a Territory by themselves, not when they already have a full time gig with Sophie and Nate. They have their hands pretty much full handling Portland.

Around the end of the third day, Parker flops back onto the sofa with a profound sigh, and says, “I have to get out of here for a while. I’m going stir crazy.” She looks at Alec. “Do we have any leads on any rogues going on right now?”

Alec, looking a little bemused, says, “Yeah, a couple. That is, I mean a couple that is a couple. A pair of vampires. A guy and a girl. Their names are Iris and Simon du Claire, and don’t ask me if they are married or brother and sister, because I haven’t been able to figure that out. My best guess is kind of both?” He makes a face. “They aren’t your standard fare, not that much of this has been all that standard, but what I mean is, they’re older, both well past their century marks, and were attached to the du Fresne clan family up until about two weeks ago, when they just left. The consensus from the Broadmoor vamps was that they had been killed by us, but then bodies started showing up. These two are way more careful than the younger vamps we’ve been hunting, but they have a type, which is most of the reason I sort of pieced it together. I was actually going to bring them up to you guys at some point tonight, because I think they need to be handled. Like I said, they have a type. They like very young men, as in, barely legal, a couple of them not even legal at all. Twinks, if you get me. And they don’t drain them to kill them. Or at least not enough for the coroner to report the cause of death as exsanguination, though he does note an unusual amount of blood loss for the methods used. They seem to be picking up teenage looking boys, taking them to hotels, and -- I can’t prove this because vampires don’t seem to leave trace evidence behind, but -- I think they’re having sex with them and torturing them to death.” Alec looks a little ill. “I mean, the news isn’t reporting it as a serial killer yet, but the news may not have put it together, the police may not have released enough of the details for that yet. I don’t know that I’d have looked very deeply into it except for the lack of trace evidence. They find traces of the victim’s semen and blood, but nothing that could be traced back to a killer. The police are really frustrated by it. And even still, I might not have thought much about it, except before I came to bed last night, I poked around in the Broadmoor’s emails, and the Master of du Fresne had sent an email to the Master of the City about Iris and Simon, implying that they might not be dead, and that they had certain appetites that they had always kept strictly under control, but that recent events suggested they might have decided to indulge, and then he’d attached a couple of newspaper articles about the killings to the email. He wanted to know what the Master of the City wanted him to do about the situation.”

“Vampire serial killers,” Parker says, lips twisted in disgust.

“So I dug into it a little more this morning and got information about the pair of them from the Bloodlines and Lineage file, and they’ve done something kind of unusual for vampires to do. They’ve clan family hopped a few times. Clan families are usually pretty tight knit; vampires do separate from their makers for a variety of reasons on occasion, but it’s not common, and a vampire normally only changes clan families for a couple of different reasons. Occasionally, a vampire will meet another vampire from a different clan family and, I am going to assume ‘fall in love’ is the right terminology, and might change clan families to be with the other vampire. Also, occasionally clan families merge, if they are both small, or if something happens to the clan families Master, and the heir is not up to handling the running of a clan family, they can petition to join another family. They usually pick another small one, and they merge together and the original clan family gives up their name and joins the new clan family. All of this, by the way, is in a document called Clan Family Hierarchy, which I had only just glanced through before I found out about Iris and Simon, but which basically is a guide on how to run your clan family, so the name of the document is kind of misleading. But I remembered skimming it, and went back to look through it when I realized that the clan family hopping was unusual. So, those are two reasons a vampire might change clan families.

“The last one, and the one that happens kind of the most frequently, is that a member of a clan family will become dissatisfied with their position in the family, their ranking, how high up they are in the chain of command, and might look for a clan family that will offer them more of a chance for advancement. Weirdly, this happens because of jobs, more than anything else in the clan families. So for example, Bob is second in command to the vampire in charge of security for a clan family, but Bob has been second in command for fifty years, and his boss doesn’t have plans to move out of the lead position, so Bob gets with his clan family Master and the whole thing is pretty up front. Bob says he is not satisfied with his position. The clan family Master will sometimes ask Bob to stay on in another position, and if Bob is just bored and looking for something different to do, Bob might agree. But if Bob has his heart set on security work, the clan family Master will ask around on Bob’s behalf and maybe find him a place in a clan family that is looking to upgrade their security position, or maybe move their security guy into another position, and they might need a replacement, or even placing Bob in the same position, second in command, in the new clan family, but promising him that he will have the opportunity to advance within X number of years. Then it’s just a matter of paperwork, if by paperwork you mean the blessing of Bob’s current clan family and the exchange of blood and swearing oaths of loyalty to the new clan family. 

“Iris and Simon, though, have been in four clan families in the past twenty years. I have no way of knowing how they explained their desire to leave one clan family for another, but in their cases, they have always had their applications accepted. So this morning, I dug around in old police reports in and around the areas where their former clan families have been located, and found just a couple of murder scenes like the ones we’re seeing now. Not enough for the cops involved to make the connections between them to call them the work of serial killers, because they were not all that close to each other, and not in the same law enforcement agencies jurisdiction, and there were just a couple that were geographically close to the clan family Iris and Simon were hooked up with at the time, so. What it probably means is that they’ve been doing this a long time. Not all the bodies have been found. When they start to feel like someone might suspect something, they move on to a new clan family. I do know that they joined du Fresne six years ago, and the Master of du Fresne told the Master of the City that Simon had wanted to go someplace where his physical and martial skills gave him an opportunity for advancement, and that Iris was just kind of baggage, that they were a package deal, though Iris is apparently really adept at teaching new vampires how to navigate their mind control abilities, so she was welcome baggage, if you get me. At any rate. Looking back through police records in Portland since they arrived here, I can find two cases that sound like it might have been them, and missing persons cases on at least fifty that could be their victim type, though the chances of them being responsible for that number of missing persons isn’t likely. People just go missing sometimes. But my point is, the Master of du Fresne seemed to know that they were potentially capable of these crimes, which means that he’d caught something in one of their minds at some point, or maybe that he had information from their previous clan family Masters that the two of them were not quite right in the head. Which means he knew they were maybe serial killers and didn’t do anything about it until they escalated to the point where they actually left the clan family home and didn’t come back, and then these bodies started showing up. I don’t know how careful they’re being now. In the past, I think they’ve been pretty careful. But serial killers escalate. And as of this morning, there have been three teenage, at least in appearance, boys that the police have found, all similar enough that the cops are starting to talk serial killer, and serious enough that the Master of du Fresne felt like he had to make the Master of the City aware of this as possibly Iris and Simon’s work.”

Eliot considers this for long silent moments, a little tickle of an idea growing in his mind. “Tell me about Simon’s physical and martial abilities,” he says, thinking hard, while the methodically cracks his knuckles.

“I only know what du Fresne told the Master of the City, which was that Simon du Claire was one of his best masters at arms, and that he primarily helped train new vampires to fight,” Alec says. “So we know that he’s a badass among vampires, and that Iris is potentially a _mental_ badass among vampires, but not much else.”

“What time is it?” Eliot asks, glancing around for the clock, and sees that it’s just past nine p.m. “Check the emails between du Fresne and the Master of the City. See if they’ve made any plans.”

Alec turns toward his computer and the click-clack of his fingers on the keys is a familiar and comforting background sound that seems to make Eliot’s brain work a little better in conjunction with, like the sound soothes him, and clears his head. He sees a possible opportunity here, and is just trying to make it take shape in his head into an actual plan of action. “And get pictures of them, and find out if they have Driver’s licences and a car registered to either of them,” he adds.

“They both have DL’s and they don’t have a car registered to them, but du Fresne reports that one of the clan families cars went missing at the same time they did. A, uh, red Mercedes AMG S63 Sedan. I’ll search the DMV for that model and color registered to anyone at the Broadmoor.”

“Du Fresne lairs at the Broadmoor, too?” Eliot asks.

“Yeah, but the Master of the City doesn’t. He has a place there, but I think it’s more like where he keeps office hours than where he lives. I have no idea where he actually lairs, and I seriously doubt that many of the vampires know either. Probably just his clan family and his personal blood servant, whose name is, uh, Luciano Guerrero, and has been with him for something like a hundred years. I’ve got files on the Master of the City and his clan family and blood servants, I mean. I’ve got files on everyone in the Broadmoor, and any clan family that’s ever sent an email to the Broadmoor that I could trace back. I’ve got like, all the files, man.” He waves his hand in a wide spiral that apparently signifies his possession of ‘all the files.’ “Okay, so last night sometime after I went to bed, Gabriel asked for detailed security dossiers on Iris and Simon. I’m printing out the attachments the Master of du Fresne sent back. He also asked for all the vehicle information, so I don’t actually have to search for that. And look at that, it’s Lojacked. So I can find the car. That’s helpful of them.” He sounds cheerful. “The Master of du Fresne, whose name is Jean Emmanuel Bellamy, which I’m telling you because ‘the Master of du Fresne’ is kind of a mouthful, so he sent Gabriel, the Master of the City, everything he had on them and the car and the places that he knows they like to go. The two of them apparently have money, apart from clan family money. Most clan families will happily support you for about a decade before they ask for a new vampire to start making money for themselves, a portion of which goes to the clan family. But being more than a century old, Iris and Simon have money of their own, and Bellamy sent Gabriel their banking information and credit card information, because apparently you don’t get a lot of privacy once you become a vampire. Though Bellamy says he’s pretty sure that Simon and Iris have other assets that the clan family doesn’t have records of. He also sent their current aliases, which are the names they joined under, so no help there, but it does include their fake social security numbers, so I may be able to track down some of those assets Bellamy doesn’t know about with a little effort. After that, nothing back from Gabriel giving any kind of instructions on what to do until tonight, about forty minutes ago. The Master of the City is pretty wily. He had the car tracked down via the Lojack, but it looks like it’s been abandoned. Or at least, the people Gabriel sent to recover it couldn’t find any sign of Iris or Simon anywhere near it. So they probably have different wheels by now. Gabriel has sent people to check the places where they are known to have frequented. He sounds pretty pissed in this email. He kind of gives Bellamy hell for not telling someone his suspicions about them as soon as he had them. He wants Bellamy to search their condo in the Broadmoor for any possible information that might help him track down new aliases they might be using or financial information that they hadn’t reported to the clan family. Bellamy hasn’t responded to this last email yet. So. The Master of the City is searching for them, but doesn’t have a lot to go on aside from their most frequent haunts, which they will avoid if they have any sense.”

He turns to look at Eliot. Eliot clasps his hands in front of his face for a long moment, and then asks, “Do you think you’d have more luck tracking down other aliases or financial assets than Bellamy would?”

“Hell yeah,” Alec says. “I don’t know this for a fact or anything, but just as a rule, I am betting most of the vampires don’t know how to do a boolean search, much less hack into government databases and financial institutions.”

Eliot nods. “Do it then.” He looks at Parker. “I’m thinking of sending the Master of the City a message asking if he wants our help. Thoughts?”

She frowns thoughtfully. “You’d have to do it by email. First I’d have Alec see if he has a more public email address than the one he uses for vampire business. The address we have now is only useful from inside their intranet, and if you use it, they’ll know we somehow have access to their intranet. Even if you send something to a more public address, he may suspect, but he won’t know for sure. Are you planning on telling him anything about how you know about what’s going on?”

“No,” Eliot says. “I’m not even planning on telling him I know their names. Just that I have information that links the deaths of the three victims the police know about to vampires who have broken vampire law, and that I am willing to help him track them down if he wants the help.”

“What kind of help do you plan on offering him. He’s going to want to know what you think you can do that _they_ can’t,” Parker says.

Eliot considers that for a long moment. “I’ll tell him almost the truth. That I have the ability to possibly track down any aliases or bank accounts the oath breakers may have, and I’ll ask him to give me their names and other information.”

Parker chews on her lip. “Are you going to identify yourself as a Daywalker?” she asks.

“Yeah, I’d planned to,” Eliot says.

Her brow furrows, her gaze going a little distant. “It’s hard to say what he’ll do. Some of it depends on what he knows about Daywalkers, and on how he feels about what he knows, which is not something we have any way of guessing. If I were him, I would want to maintain contact with you, though, either because he thinks you might be able to help, or because he plans to find you and kill you if he can. So I’m guessing he would respond in some way, give you some kind of information, maybe just bare bones. He might want to set up a meeting. I wouldn’t suggest doing that at this point.” Eliot snorts a little, but doesn’t interrupt. “Really, he’s going to react in one of three ways. He will either be hostile to Daywalkers, but will want to string you along and try to draw you out someplace where he can get to you. He might be cautiously in favor of Daywalkers, and willing to accept your help, though he will still want to draw you out just to make you into a known quantity. Or he will be neutral toward Daywalkers, in which case it’s actually harder to tell what he’ll do than if he were actively against us. No matter what, he’s going to want to make you into a known quantity. Don’t agree to meet with him under any circumstances. It’s a knotty problem. But as far as making first contact with the vampires goes, I don’t think it is necessarily bad timing. One thing you are revealing to him no matter what is that you are in the city. They already suspect they’ve got a Daywalker, but this will only confirm it. The other thing you are revealing is that you have the ability to recognize a vampire related crime that isn’t, on the surface, obviously performed by vampires. It’s not exsanguination, which would be an easy connection for you to make. It’s sex and torture. He’ll want to know how you found out what you know.”

“I will tell him I have sources in the police department that advised me of an unusual amount of blood loss compared to what they’ve seen in similar crimes,” Eliot says. “Because however they killed them, you know they drank from them, probably before and during the sex and torture,” Eliot says.

Parker thinks about that. “It’s extremely likely, but we should see if we can find out if it’s true before we tell him that. Alec should be able to access police and coroner's reports to check. If it’s not true, and he finds out later somehow that they didn’t leave the corpse unusually bloodless, then he’ll know you lied to him. If you want to build a real working relationship with the vampires, starting with the Master of the City, you can’t ever let him know that you lied to him about anything. You can evade questions, or refuse to answer them. He’ll expect that. But if he finds out you flat out lied, any trust we try to establish is always going to be marred by that.”

Eliot nods. “Good point.”

Alec says, “I actually already said that there was blood loss that couldn’t be attributed to the methods of torture used,” without even stopping his typing.

“Oh,” Parker says. “I maybe wasn’t listening that close because I didn’t want to hear about the torture part,” she apologizes. “So maybe tell him both that you recognized it as vampire related because of the lack of trace evidence in the forensic analysis of the scenes. You may have to explain to him what that means exactly, but it’s something we already know from the reports for sure. Best if you tell him both, show that you checked into it before you just assumed it was vampire related. So yeah, tell him that the bodies exhibited blood loss greater than the extent of their injuries justified, and that no trace evidence of any kind was found on the scene. To a Daywalker, a crime like that would practically scream vampire, and he’d know that, I think. It depends a little on how much he knows about modern forensics, but.” She bites her lip. “I don’t think you’d be doing anything dangerous by telling him that vampires don’t leave trace evidence behind the way that humans do. I don’t think it will up the vampire crime rate or anything.”

She pauses for a long moment, her gaze intent on his. “You still want to work with them after what happened after they killed Samael? Some of them, at least, are the same people that screamed for Sun Walker blood after it was over. This isn’t ancient history to them, or not to all of them. It’s their real past. Things they lived through and experienced. Both sides blamed the Sun Walkers for what I’m strongly disposed to think they had very little control over. The Council members of Italy were probably already hopped up on Sun Walker blood when they met the challenges Samael issued, and I doubt Switzerland or Austria’s Councils had Sun Walkers attached to them. There just weren’t that many of them that were powerful like us. You get that, don’t you. The old Councils may have collected any Daywalkers that seemed inclined to help them maintain the laws, but the ones that mattered, the ones that made them stronger by drinking their blood, were the ones like us. And there weren’t that many of us. There have never been that many of us. They blamed us for upholding the laws that they had made, both sides blamed us from different directions. Do we _want_ to help them?”

Eliot considers that for a long time. “Vampires are people,” he says finally. “When they are angry or afraid, people look for someone to blame. The Sun Walkers took the hit. I think it was that, or they would have turned on each other, and it would have been a vampire war. A totally pointless one, after Samael was dead, but I think it would have happened anyway, and that regular people would have ended up dead in a vampire war. That doesn’t excuse it, and I feel some outrage on behalf of those Sun Walkers, the ones that were killed because they took Samael into the sun, or because we were somehow supposed to stop him before he went as far as he did, depending on which side you talk to. But it doesn’t surprise me that it happened that way. I still feel like they need us, but I have no desire to attach any of us to the U.S. Council. They can get in touch with us via an untraceable email address if they need us for something. We need the other Daywalkers. We especially need to try to find any other triumvirates. Sun Walkers. Whatever. But we can dismantle the archive that’s in place if we have to and create one of our own, one that gives more information, one that gives the Daywalkers a sense of their own history and a purpose other than straight violence. That will take time, but it can be done. But, I guess the answer is yes. 

“I feel like we’re supposed to be their balance. That might sometimes mean feeding them our blood, and it might sometimes mean killing them by the dozens, but I feel like we have to work with them from within to do what we need to do to be their balance. If we don’t work to establish some kind of a peace, they’re going to kill our people. I know we aren’t quite the same as the other Daywalkers, but they’re still our people. They’re still people, period. We need to change minds about Daywalkers, and not just the vampires minds, but the other Daywalkers’ minds as well. They should be more than just executioners. We should be more than the clean up crew when a vampire goes wrong. Maybe there is a better way to do it than this, but I’m making it up as I go along. The rulebook was written by the enemy. Or at least by the misguided.” He shakes his head a little, and rubs a hand over his face. “I don’t even know what I’m saying, I’m just rattling off what’s in my head. What about you? We don’t have to do anything you don’t like.”

She smiles at him a little. “I don’t know what I want to do yet,” she says easily, as though it doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t know. “Some of it depends on whether or not what you’re planning on doing right now works. It’s all a matter of perspective, with the vampires. Staying on the outside has different risks than being on the inside. I’m willing to see how this goes, but for me, this one is not just about deciding how the Master of the City will respond to us. It isn’t even about vampires at all. It’s about people being tortured to death by crazy people. I’m always going to be against that, no matter what the vampires think about the Daywalkers. I’m always going to do whatever I can to stop it, no matter who does or does not want my help.”

Eliot is a little ashamed to hear it said so plainly. He feels the same way, of course; he’ll do whatever he can to stop these two, no matter what the Master of the City says. But he had been thinking about what could happen in a broader sense than she has, from a core of basic human decency. He hadn’t forgotten about people being tortured to death, but he had definitely been thinking of a way to use it in his agenda, which is a little laughable, because his agenda is still not quite clear to him. He isn’t sure what he’s trying to build with the vampires. Some kind of trust? Some kind of cooperative working relationship? He isn’t sure. 

And he isn’t sure it’s needed. He thinks it is, but the Daywalkers have been functioning without it for centuries now. What is it he wants? To get them taken off the ‘kill on sight’ list, maybe?

To get the vampires taken off the Daywalkers’ ‘kill on sight’ list, as well?

The vampires laws, aside from killing Daywalkers on sight, are within reason.

The fact that the vampires aren’t the ones upholding them, that the Daywalkers are the ones that step in and take out the rogue element, isn’t even something he feels needs changing.

Except that more information is better, and if there was a working relationship in place, there could be an exchange of information. A clan family Master could contact a Daywalker and tell them: _I have a rogue. He or she is capable of this._ And if that turns out to be more than what the Daywalker thinks he can manage, he should be able to call in backup. Make a call or a post. _There is a rogue here. Unusually strong. Can anyone in the area back me up?_

Is it cross-communication that he wants? Is that all that he’s trying to set up?

It is, but it’s not, too. There is more to it. He just isn’t sure what it is exactly. He’s not mastermind material, like Nate. He’s going to have to bring Parker and Alec in on this in a more directed way, try to lay out his thoughts for them, find out their thoughts on the issue, explain the way it _feels_ to them, shit that Eliot isn’t good at.

He listens to Alec typing, familiar and normal, and doesn’t interrupt what he’s doing to try to track down the two vampires because Parker is right about that part, at least. Tracking down and getting rid of a pair of vampire serial killers is more important right now than Eliot’s questions about what he should be trying to do to make contact with the vampires. He’ll wait until Alec is done searching and they have some possible leads, and then he’ll get some input from the other two thirds of his triumvirate on what the right way to approach the vampires is.

“Hey,” Parker says, her voice suddenly a little sharp. “Is there a way to check to see if either of them have cell phones registered in their names? Because if they do, their cell phones probably have GPS. And I know we can track GPS.”

Alec has paused in his typing, and for a long moment says nothing. “Then,” smile audible in his voice, he says, “Parker, you get the biggest fucking cookie for that.”

Parker grins, and Alec’s computer screen, visible from where Eliot is sitting on the couch, though he can’t actually read anything on it, shuffles through several open windows to a new window, and Alec starts typing again.

This time it’s only a few minutes, and Alec says, “Fuck the cookie, you get all the sexual favors,” sounding triumphant. “They both have cell phones, and they’re both on, and they are both in the same place.” He spins in his chair to face Eliot. “If you’re going to contact the Master of the City about this, you should probably go ahead and do it. And, yeah, I was listening, I got most of what you were saying, and I could probably find an external email for him, but instead, I’ve got a cell phone number for him, too.”

Eliot lets that sink in for a moment, and then nods slowly. “Okay,” he says. “This is a point we should all be in agreement on. Do we want to contact the vampires and offer our assistance on this? Keeping in mind that we can take care of it without them, and that doing so gives the vampires positive proof that there is a Daywalker active in their territory. And that it doesn’t have to be this time. We could wait, talk it over more, work out the logistics better, and contact the vampires later. It might give us more time to decide who to contact. If we do it on this, it pretty much has to be the Master of the City. If we wait, we can try picking a member of the Council that we think might be sympathetic, or we could contact the council as a whole, more formally.”

Alec tents his fingers in front of his face and rests his thumbs against his lower lips. “I’ve been thinking about it for days, Eliot. Since we decided to break into Ipsilon and set it up so we could theoretically contact the Vampire Council if we wanted to, even though that was mostly secondary to getting our hands on the information we’ve been sorting through for the last three days. It’s obvious that the Daywalkers perform a necessary function for the vampires. And while I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to get us as close to the vampires as the Sun Walkers in the histories used to be, or at least not without a whole lot more information, I think opening up lines of communication with the vampires is a good idea, not just for us, but for all the Daywalkers. It will mean changes in the ways that both vampires and Daywalkers deal with one another. And if we do it, the three of us are going to have to take on changing the way the Daywalkers do things, the way it’s more or less open season on vampires. We’d also have to lobby the vampires not to let it be open season on us. But if we do it right, the Daywalkers would end up working hand in glove with the vampires, and that could save lives on both sides. 

“And as far as the archive goes… I can take it over. I’ve been very carefully leaning on it, and I have a pretty good idea of how it’s set up. I think I can take control of it. That’s not taking into account the physical location of the servers that host the archive. We might have to do something about that, because whoever controls that now can pull the plug on the archive any time he wants if he doesn’t like what I’m doing. And we still don’t know about the old Sun Walkers that Hirota mentioned. The archive might end up being in a kind of tug of war, with me giving out information, and them deleting whatever changes I make, but if I can get far enough into the system, I think I can take control of that, too. So, basically, whoever has physical control of the archive servers can pull the plug on us at will, but other than that happening, I am pretty sure I have the skills to take over the archive and give out whatever information we want put out there. In the end, if the person in control of the physical servers decides to pull the plugs, I can build a new archive. Something that even halfway computer literate Daywalkers would be able to find if they were looking for it, and the only flaw in that plan is that it wouldn’t be Daywalker only accessible. I could eventually build up to that level of security, but in the beginning, it would have to be something the Daywalkers could find, when the old archive suddenly stopped existing, if you get what I’m saying. But Eliot, there is so much vampire bullshit on the web, I’ve got to tell you, it would really surprise me if that caused us any real problems. It would read as much like fiction as any of the other six million vampire websites do. And if there is time, I can even get around that. I can hack the archive hard enough to get the numbers and code names of the current members of the archive, and program a site that they can only get into using their information from the old archive. It would still be easier to _find_ via web searches, because if the old site suddenly disappeared, it would have to be, but it could be almost as hard to access. That will take a little more time, but it can be done.” He pauses, giving Eliot a look that is half-questioning. “Are you following me?”

“Yeah, more or less,” Eliot says. “And I don’t doubt what you can do on the computer, so that part doesn’t worry me too much. I’d want you to try to limit access to the Daywalkers with active file numbers and code names, because I’d want to put up a lot of stuff on it that I wouldn’t want the general public to have access to. Parts of the histories, and definitely the laws that have to do with what the vampires are allowed to do concerning humans. I’d want for them to be aware that there are vampires out there that abide by vampire law, and that the law doesn’t allow them to kill humans except in very limited situations. I’d want it set up so that the Daywalkers who read it get some of the history, because the history humanizes the vampires in some ways. It makes it so they have to be taken as individuals, so that Daywalkers are aware that not all vampires are rogues, and not all vampires should be killed just because they happen to be vampires. It might still take a while to sink in, but I’d want the information out there. And because it’s not really our information to share, we have to protect it on behalf of the vampires, so that random people on the internet aren’t getting a lot of true facts about vampire existence, whether they’d recognize them as true or not.”

Alec is nodding. “Yeah, that can be done. I will probably end up hacking and editing this stuff into the existing archive, maybe fighting with whoever has administrative control over what is posted to keep my stuff available on the old archive, at the same time that I build a new archive, which I’ll make available as soon as it’s done, because I really do believe that if I’m fighting an anti-vampire propaganda collective on the old archive, they will eventually shut it down, rather than let me tell the truth about vampires on their site. I’ll have to get a few things, some hardware, or I might have all I need in boxes somewhere, but it can be done. Hell, if they shut the old archive down, there is a pretty good chance that I can hack and take over the old domain name, or set up a tag on the old domain name that will redirect a user to our archive automatically. There is some fancy hacking involved in doing that, but I’m pretty sure I can do it.”

“Okay,” Eliot says. “That puts us in a position to change the Daywalkers’ attitude towards vampires, which is great, but we still have to deal with changing the way the vampires view the Daywalkers. The only way I can think to do that is to actually interact with the vampires, at first only just us, but then maybe setting something up so a clan family with a rogue on its hands can actually request help from the Daywalkers. Cross-communication. I mean, I keep thinking, this is not _all_ of what I’m trying to do, but it’s important, it’s a step toward what I want to do.”

“What is it you want to do?” Parker asks. “End goal, I mean. What kind of relationship are you trying to set up between the vampires and the Daywalkers.”

“That’s the part that I’m not sure of,” Eliot confesses, and rakes a hand through his hair, shoving it back from his face. “I’m not trying to recreate the kind of relationship that existed in the histories. I’m pretty sure that’s not safe for the regular Daywalkers, if you get what I mean, considering the way that the pact fell apart. But I… I _feel_ like they need us. And by us, I mean the Sun Walkers, though I’m not discounting the regular Daywalkers here. They perform a service. Something the vampires need. They just don’t realize that the rogues that they kill are only the dangerous fringe element of vampire… civilization, for lack of a better word. I want for them to know that not all vampires are killers, and to not kill the vampires that are not a danger to humans. But when I say they need us, I really mean the ones like us. I feel like we’re their balance, but I can’t pinpoint what it is exactly that I feel like we should be doing to _be_ that balance.”

“Part of it is leading the Daywalkers,” Parker says matter of factly. “I mean, part of being their balance is changing the way the Daywalkers interact with vampires, and thus also changing the way the vampires interact with the Daywalkers. If we put the two groups in balance by giving the Daywalkers a look at the history and the laws and changing the way they think, if we open lines of communication between the two groups, then the first thing that happens is that they stop killing each other automatically. The Daywalkers are more careful to kill only the rogues, the vampires don’t feel like the Daywalkers are a threat to all vampires. It won’t happen right away, but eventually, we set up a situation in which the Daywalkers perform a necessary service for the vampires, and if we do set up lines of communication, the vampires can warn the Daywalkers involved if a rogue is particularly powerful, maybe even offer rewards for doing this thing that the vampires clearly hate to do themselves.”

Eliot frowns a little bit at the phrasing. “What do you mean, that they hate to do it themselves?” he asks, but even as he’s asking it, he has a kind of hunch about it.

“They don’t like killing their own kind,” Parker says. “Part of it is that a vampire killing his or her own progeny is dangerous for the vampire, but if that was all it was, then they would make some kind of deal with another clan family to take care of the problem for them, and Daywalkers wouldn’t even be needed. But they don’t because every vampire with a link mark knows how it feels to have a link mark broken, and even if the thing is not done by a rogue’s creator, it still causes that creator pain when the mark is severed. So instead of making deals within the clan families to take care of rogues, they let a separate group pretty much police the problem, because if clan family x kills clan family y’s rogue progeny, clan family y is not going to be able to forget that it was clan family x that caused the pain of a severed link mark, and clan family x is always going to know that clan family y remembers and maybe hates them a little for causing that kind of trauma. I don’t think the vampires think of it like that, exactly. But I think that’s what it boils down to. They don’t like killing their own kind because it causes friction in the vampire community, and there is already a lot of friction in their community, with challenges for position and rank, both inside and outside a given clan family, some of which end in death, although it’s not uncommon for there to be limits set on challenges so that they don’t, because, like I said, they don’t like killing their own kind. The only kinds of challenges that are required to be to the death are challenges for the Mastery of a Territory. You can’t challenge at all for the position of heir to a Territory. The Master of the Territory chooses his heir and usually a secondary heir, just in case, and unless the Territory changes hands, a vampires status as an heir is safe as houses. It has to be that way, because the heir is the direct progeny of the Master of the Territory in almost every case, and if you could challenge and kill the heir, the Master of the Territory would rip you apart just from the pain of the severed link mark. Same within clan families. To use Alec’s example from the other night, Bob, the vampire who is the second in command for clan security, could, under vampire law, challenge the vampire above him and take command. But it doesn’t happen that often, because Bob’s boss is probably the clan family Master’s direct progeny, and challenging and killing him would hurt that Master. If the Master of the clan family didn’t kill Bob on the spot, which would sometimes happen even if Bob was also the direct progeny of the clan family Master, which would, of course, cause the clan family Master a much more dangerous chance of going temporarily crazy, then you could still be pretty certain that the clan family Master is not going to forget the pain Bob caused him, and Bob’s position in the clan, while technically higher than it was before, costs him the goodwill of the clan family Master. But that almost never happens. It goes like Alec said. Bob goes to his clan family Master and just tells him he isn’t satisfied with his place within the clan, and they work something out.”

“I’m going to have to read the whole history, I think,” Eliot says, which is true, but makes him feel a little tired, after everything he’s managed to read and absorb over the last three days.

“It’s long and it gives a lot of information,” Parker says. “But it doesn’t say flat out that Bob’s challenge is probably going to leave him worse off than he was to begin with, as far as his position in the clan goes. It just tells stories of challenges and the consequences of them, and you have to read between the lines to figure out why Bob shouldn’t have done it that way.” Parker shrugs. “It’s like reading parables,” she says. “The history documents things, certain events, and it’s up to the reader to decode the meaning behind the story.” 

“Sounds delightful,” Eliot says wryly. 

“It helped though,” Parker says. “I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on why vampires do things the way they do. Probably not everything, and I’m probably not right all the time, but the histories definitely give you a lot of background information that you can use to base patterns of behavior on.”

“What do their patterns of behavior tell you about how they’re going to react if I contact the Master of the City and offer him my help?” Eliot asks.

Parker smiles, but without much humor. “Too many variables. My understanding of vampire behavior is general. This situation is too specific. I can tell you something about the Master of the City, though, from his emails and the effort he’s putting into finding these two.”

“Yeah?” Eliot asks.

“It’s a little out of character for your average vampire when the crimes committed aren’t obviously vampire related. He intends to stop them, even though the typical signs of vampire involvement aren’t as obviously present in these crimes as they would be if the victims were just drained dry. He cares about upholding the spirit of the law, and not just the letter. I’m not saying he cares about human life more than any other given vampire, but he cares about more than just hiding the fact that vampires exist,” Parker says.

Eliot considers that for several long moments. “Is offering our help the right thing to do, and is it the right time to do it, is the question,” Eliot says.

Parker regards him seriously. “Why not?” she says. “If we intend to take these two out anyway, which we do, and if we also intend to at some point make some kind of peaceful overture toward the vampires in some way, why not do it now, in a situation about which we suspect the Master of the City is personally invested in taking care of?”

Eliot looks at Alec, who spreads his hands. “I don’t see what we have to lose,” Alec says. “The big guy seems like he is pretty pissed that this could even happen in his territory; all we’re doing is offering to help him make it go away. And on top of that, we’re going to do it anyway, and probably faster and better than he could, which, once it’s done, he will most likely recognize. It can’t hurt to make ourselves look extremely dangerous and competent.”

Eliot can see how that could hurt, actually, but isn’t going to argue the point because it’s more right than the alternative. Better to be seen as dangerous and competent than as weak or ineffectual.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll need one of the burner phones and the phone number,” he says, and tries not to worry about what specifically he’s going to say. Better if he just makes the offer, without embellishment, and then deals with whatever comes after by giving as little information away as possible while still protecting their access to the Broadmoor’s intranet.

Parker goes to dig one of the burner phones out of their stash of them while Alec reads off the number and Eliot jots it down on one of the numerous printouts that had accumulated on his end of the coffee table.

He accepts the burner phone from Parker, takes a deep breath, and dials the number for the Master of the City.


	38. Chapter 38

It rings three times, and then is answered with a simple, “Hello,” in a deep male voice.

“Am I speaking to Gabriel Romero Vega, Mater of the City of Portland?” Eliot asks.

“You are,” the male voice responds, without much expression in it. “Who is this.”

“A Sun Walker,” Eliot says. “I’m calling to offer assistance.”

“Assistance for what?” the Master of the City asks, voice a little sharp, and betraying the faintest hint of an accent.

“Assistance in tracking down the vampire serial killer currently at large in the city,” Eliot says, choosing his words carefully.

There are several seconds of silence on the other end of the phone. To Eliot’s surprise, the Master of the City doesn’t ask how Eliot knows about the situation. Instead, he asks, “What kind of assistance is it that you think you can offer in tracking the rogues that _we_ cannot undertake ourselves?”

Eliot is pleased that the Master of the City has admitted that there is more than one of them. It means he doesn’t have to watch what he says quite as carefully. “I have the resources to track them via some computer technology, if you’re willing to give me the name or names of the rogues involved.”

Another several seconds of silence pass. “Why would I help you?” he finally asks. 

“Because your people don’t have the same kind of access to restricted information that I can access with a computer, so your search is limited to putting vampires in places where you think they might go based on where they have gone in the past. You can’t sense your own kind the way that I can unless you have a link mark established with them, which I think you don’t, or you would have used it to track them already. If you give me their information, I can use it to track down any aliases or financial resources they have and may be using. And if that fails, I can go to the kinds of places they have been using when they kill, and sense them if they’re there.”

“Is that how you got this phone number? By computer…” he pauses as if unsure of the word, and then finishes with, “...hacking?” making the last word almost a question, as though he’s not sure he’s using the term correctly.

“Yes,” Eliot says simply.

“Why should I trust you? Your kind hunt and kill my kind.”

“I only hunt the ones that kill humans, which is against vampire law. I don’t kill indiscriminately. That is true of most of the Daywalkers, though I don’t speak for all of them. I know mistakes are sometimes made. And vampires don’t make any distinction at all. Whether we hunt only rogues or not, you kill any of us you find.”

“It is a fair point,” the Master of the City says, suddenly sounding a little weary. “We give you no quarter. Tell me, how do you know that you are only killing rogues when you go out and hunt us, Sun Walker?”

“Usually there is already a body count, and a pattern. Rogues tend to establish patterns, hunt in the same areas or hunt the same kind of prey. I track their patterns and watch them. Also.” Eliot hesitates, and then decides to give up this secret. “A vampire who is killing humans feels different than a vampire that is in control of their hunger. A vampire that doesn’t kill when they feed projects a sense of control that rogues don’t have. Not all Daywalkers understand the difference. Mistakes get made. But not very many, because when we hunt, there is already a body count, a trail of some kind to follow.”

“And have you ever made such a mistake?” he asks. 

Eliot decides to answer honestly. “I don’t know. The first vampire I ever killed might have been a mistake. I didn’t have the experience to be able to tell the difference. I only knew that he was feeding, and I stopped him.”

There is a brief pause. “I am gratified at your honesty,” the Master of the City says at last. “If I give you the information on these two rogues and you find them, will you contact me and allow me to deal with them?”

“No,” Eliot says. “There is the possibility that they’ll move between the time I contact you and when you can get to them, and I won’t risk it. And I won’t wait around to make sure they don’t, because I don’t know you well enough to trust that you wouldn’t ‘deal with me’ as well. Besides that, historically, it has always been the Sun Walker’s duty to deal with rogues.”

“What do you know about our history, that makes you say so?” the Master of the City asks, voice dropping down a register, becoming just a little bit menacing.

“I know as much as I’ve been able to put together,” Eliot says. “I’m sure it’s not everything, but it’s enough to know we weren’t always at odds. We worked together, once, and made each other stronger.”

“It is my oath-given duty under vampire law to find and stop these rogues from committing further atrocities. If I let this duty fall to you, what guarantees do I have that you will succeed?”

“I will succeed or die trying,” Eliot says. “And if you do decide to give me the information you have about them, I am close to certain that I can do it faster than you can, possibly before they kill again.”

“How did you find out? They do not leave bloodless corpses behind, as most rogues unfortunately do,” the Master of the City wants to know.

“I have sources in the police department and the coroner’s office,” Eliot says. “I was able to find out details that indicated that a vampire was most likely responsible.”

“What details?” he asks.

“Vampires don’t leave certain kinds of trace evidence behind that would be present if the victims had been killed by a human. And the bodies weren’t drained, but there was some degree of blood loss that couldn’t be totally explained by the manner of their deaths,” Eliot says.

“Trace evidence?” the Master of the City asks, sounding a little bewildered.

“Fingerprints, hair, traces of DNA evidence. Vampires don’t leave bits of themselves behind on their victims bodies,” Eliot explains. He really hopes Parker is right, and telling the Master of the City this isn’t going to really matter. 

“Is this something that human authorities might be able to use to prove the existence of vampires?” the Master of the City asks, sounding grim.

“No. Lack of evidence doesn’t prove anything. It’s just indicative information if you already know what you’re looking for,” Eliot says.

“I have misgivings,” the Master of the City says, and then is silent again for several seconds. “However, I am not confident of my ability to find them and stop them in a timely manner. I could call for their maker to track them, but it would be some time before he would arrive, if he would even agree, which is by no means assured.”

Eliot says nothing to that, and the silence spools out for nearly a minute.

“Their current names are Iris and Simon du Claire. What other information do you need from me?” he asks, his tone heavy.

“Do they have driver’s licenses under those names?” Eliot asks, although he already knows that they do.

“Yes, as well as birth certificates and passports. That is all you require?” There is a barely there hint of surprise and maybe a little uneasiness in the Master of the City’s voice.

“It should be enough,” Eliot says. “I have resources.”

“It concerns me that you believe that you can do so much with so little,” the Master of the City says. 

“Not all of the Daywalkers could,” Eliot says. “In fact, I’m willing to bet most of them couldn’t. But I have access to skillsets that most of them don’t have, and more financial resources than most of them have access to.”

“I am not sure if that is a comfort,” the Master of the City says, his tone actually a little wry. “After all, you know my name, and thus could conceivably locate me just as easily as you claim you will be able to locate them.”

“I didn’t say it was easy,” Eliot says. “I said I can do it. There is a difference. And I have no reason to hunt you. I will never kill a vampire that lives by the laws unless he tries to kill me first.”

“It disturbs me that I believe you,” the Master of the City says thoughtfully. “If necessary, can I reach you at this number in the future?”

“For the next forty-eight hours you can,” Eliot says. “After that, I’ll get rid of this phone for my own safety.”

“Very well. I accept your offer of assistance. You have my blessing to hunt these two rogues in my Territory. If you require assistance or further information, I will provide it to you within the scope of my abilities.” He pauses. “Simon du Claire is an extremely dangerous and well trained fighter,” he says. “Iris du Claire has exceptional mental gifts. I warn you of these things in the event that you are able to contact additional help in the Daywalker… community. I do not know how powerful you are among your kind, but these two are by no means average rogues, who as a rule, are young, and do not have a great deal of finesse in using their vampiric abilities. This is not the case with these two. They are very dangerous. I am willing to guarantee you safe conduct if you feel you may not be a match for them, and send some of my people to assist you.”

Eliot is a little surprised by the offer. It gives him a little flash of hope concerning their dealings with _this_ vampire, at least. “I appreciate that,” he says sincerely. “But I can call in my own backup. The heads up is appreciated, though. It gives me a better idea of what kind of fight I’m going into, and more information about that kind of thing is always better.”

“Were you responsible for the destruction of the nest in the warehouse district?” the Master of the City asks.

Eliot considers evading the question, but then decides not to. “I waited to see if you guys were going to do something about it,” he says. “But the longer I waited, the more dangerous it got. When I started worrying that it would be too much for me to handle, I took action. I understand if you aren’t happy about that, but I won’t apologize for it.”

“No need. I understand your position. Likely we would not have waited much longer to have dealt with it, but we have the advantage of numbers in cases like that one. I don’t pretend to know the extent to which Daywalkers have a community, but as we most often encounter your kind alone, when we do encounter them, I have always believed you to work mostly independently of one another. Taking out the nest before it could grow larger was tactically sound if you do not have the same kind of advantage of numbers that we do.”

“I get by,” Eliot says dryly, a little amused at being subtly probed for information by the Master of the City. He’s not surprised. He’s actually a little surprised he’s not getting asked a lot more questions than he is.

“Is there something I can call you?” the Master of the City asks. “In the event that I try to get in touch with you before you discard your current telephone.”

Telephone, not cell phone. Old habits die hard, Eliot guesses.

“My name is Eliot,” he says, without much in the way of hesitation.

“Very well, Eliot. I shall leave this problem in your hands for the moment. If possible, I would like you to contact me if you succeed. I will want to send someone to take care of the bodies, if they aren’t given to the sun.”

“I can do that,” Eliot agrees.

“I will wish you luck,” the Master of the City says. “This whole situation seems too unlikely to be real. I will have to report this to the Vampire Council, and explain to them my reasoning behind allying myself with a Daywalker, and I hardly know how I will justify it. Yet, I will still wish you luck.”

“I appreciate it,” Eliot says. “I’ll call you when it’s done. If you don’t hear from me within forty-eight hours, you probably need to assume I’m dead, and start looking for another way to track them down.”

“I will keep it in mind,” the Master of the City says, sounding faintly amused now.

Eliot disconnects the call and sets the phone down on top of his untidy stack of printouts.

“That went better than I expected,” he says, and then has to relay the Master of the City’s half of the conversation to Alec and Parker, along with tone and inflection.

They both kind of slouch back in their seats when he’s finished with that, looking thoughtful.

“I think he’s grasping at straws,” Parker says finally. “He knows he doesn’t really have a great chance of finding the two of them, and for whatever reason, really wants them stopped.” Her brow is slightly furrowed. “I wish I could have heard his voice,” she says. “Next time we put him on speaker.”

“For the most part, I got the feeling that trusting me wasn’t his favorite idea in the world, but it beat the hell out of his next available option,” Eliot says.

“While you were on the phone I did a little financial tracking,” Alec says. “They both have accounts at different banks than the ones du Fresne gave to the Master of the City, and they both have taken out substantial sums over the last two weeks. No credit cards that I have been able to find, which either means they’re smart enough to know cards could be tracked, or are maybe just old enough that it never occurred to them to get credit cards as backups, in case they couldn’t use the ones they had that their clan family knew about. They both have debit cards, but they aren’t using them so far. Their phone GPS puts them in a hotel downtown, small and exclusive, The...uh… Glenclaive. They haven’t rented a car as far as I can tell, and if they bought a new one, they’ve got thirty days to register it before I can find it via computer. So, I don’t want to be the one to bring this up, because I personally can’t handle the idea of torture, but we may want to get on this right away in case they actually have a victim in the hotel they’re holed up in right now.”

“How likely is that?” Eliot asks, more hoping for a decent guess than expecting one.

But Alec says, “Unlikely, I think. The hotel they’re in is relatively small and expensive. They’ve been using bigger, cheaper places to make their kills. This is the kind of place where you can order a five course meal from room service, and the chef will come to your room to serve it to you. It feels more like they’re celebrating something than committing homicide in this place.”

“So much the better,” Eliot says, and stands up and heads for the closet with his fighting leathers in it. “Damn, I’d rather do this in daylight, but I just don’t trust them to stay put.”

“We’re going to look pretty conspicuous in leathers in a place like this, Eliot,” Parker points out as Eliot is reaching for the handle of the closet.

He pauses. She’s right. But if these two are as dangerous as they’ve been warned that they are, they really need every advantage.

“I really don’t want to try to fight Simon du Claire without all the protection I can manage,” Eliot says.

Alec is clicking away at his keyboard. After a minute or so, he makes a triumphant noise. “They have service corridors,” he says, flipping his laptop to show Eliot a blueprint that he can’t really read from this distance. “I told you this place was fancy.”

“Service corridors?” Parker asks.

“Hallways that run through the building that the staff uses so that they don’t bother the guests with their plebian existence,” Alec says. “Three service entrances, and while the place isn’t exactly honeycombed with them, there are enough for us to go through them and get within sensing distance of almost every room. It’s not a big hotel. Just fancy.”

“Won’t the staff be the ones we’re trying to avoid?” Parker asks, a little amusement lacing her voice.

“Ah. Good point. Well, still useful. We can enter by one of the service entrances and then get out into the main corridors as soon as possible. Chances are, the main halls will be mostly deserted this time of night.” He shrugs. “It’s a risk, either way. Both sets of hallways are unlikely to be very populated this late. The big questions is whether we’d rather a guest or a staff member see us dressed in leathers.”

“I can probably solve most of the problem by letting my mind range ahead trying to sense people,” Parker says. “It’s not one hundred percent accurate, but it mostly works.

“We can’t afford the sound of a sword fight in a fancy hotel, either,” Eliot says, resigned. “We can look less intimidating by not taking swords. Or at least, not long swords.”

Alec plucks the security dossiers on Iris and Simon he’d printed out earlier from off the printer and scans them. “According to this, Simon has guns, swords, and fists, as fighting skills. Whether or not he’ll have a sword with him is up in the air, but he’s supposed to be pretty lethal even without them.” He gives Eliot a kind of puppydog look. “Are you really going to ask me to leave my best weapon at home when we’re going up against someone with real fighting skills?”

Eliot sighs. “What’s the biggest sized duffel bag we have?” he asks.

“Big enough,” Parker chirps, looking pleased. “I bought bags of all sizes when I realized sometimes we would have to carry in the weapons, rather than wearing them in someplace. Hockey and LaCrosse bags are big enough for Alec’s long sword. If we put all the weapons in a bag, we will be a little obvious in the leathers, but not _that_ obvious. Especially if we go in the front and rent a room. Then they’ll just assume that we’ve got motorcycles stored somewhere. And if we flash a big enough credit balance at them, they probably won’t care what we’re wearing.”

Alec and Hardison exchange a look.

Parker lets out a little huff of exasperation. “It’s what Sophie would say to do,” she points out. “Nate, too. So we’re all decked out in leathers, so what? As pricey as they are, I’m betting they’ve seen a little of everything. I mean. This kind of hotel is the kind where you can probably get the desk clerk to discreetly hook you up with an escort service, because this kind of money makes the weird seem almost normal.”

“Okay,” Eliot says, holding up his hands. “Use the Beaumont I.D. and reserve us a room. The Beaumont I.D. has the AmEx Black, make sure to use it for the reservation.”

Parker goes to the wall safe where they keep the really incriminating stuff, and starts to shuffle through 8 x 11 envelopes, each one of which contains an alias. She plucks one out, shuffles through the others and plucks another pair out. Better that everyone involved have some kind of I.D. on them, and better if it’s a good fit together. Most of their I.D.’s are designed to be able to be easily linked together, in case of misadventure, so that they don’t end up with one of them being a rich trust fund millionaire while one of them has to play a tax accountant from Ohio.

Beaumont, Eliot thinks, goes along with James Hammond III for Alec, and Katrina ‘Kitty’ Lennox, for Parker. He starts trying to get his head into a place where he will remember to call them by the right names if it comes up as he undoes all the work he’d done weaponizing his leathers for instant deadliness, and stows them in a bag that is easily long enough for Alec’s longsword. Hell, a claymore would probably fit in it, if necessary. 

Parker makes her voice somehow both silly and commanding, and makes the call to reserve a room, sounding just like she’s supposed to: A rich young heiress without a lot going on between her ears, but that is used to getting her way. They obviously tell her they don’t have anything available, but she throws around her name (Eliot suspects someone at the hotel is googling it, and coming up with the important details) and they eventually tell her they’d be happy to accommodate her. She makes a fuss about the penthouse suite being already rented, but only a little one -- if it’s the vampires in the penthouse suite, they don’t want to get them rousted -- and sighingly accepts the Oceanic suite instead, after checking and being assured that it has a jacuzzi tub, a separate shower, a custom King sized bed -- bigger by a foot than a California King -- and a separate living and sleeping area, with all night room service available.

It’s only minor grifting, but she does it well, she’s getting good at it, definitely better than Alec, probably better than Eliot. He can grift when he needs to, and relatively well, but it’s not a skill set he works very hard at. He thinks maybe he should consider changing that, with the way the three of them are mixing and matching skills lately.

When she gets off the phone, Eliot is working on de-weaponing Alec’s leathers, and he asks, “Hey, Parker. Can you teach me to crack a safe?”

Parker’s eyes go wide and bright with excitement. “Really?” she asks.

“Yeah, you know. I figure as long as we’re exchanging skills. I’ve got a little skill at picking locks, but not really serious locks, so it might be good to pick up some of that, too.”

Parker beams at him, and when that apparently isn’t enough, skips across the room and throws herself into his arms to kiss him enthusiastically, a kiss during which she’s smiling too broadly to really make a lot of lip contact. “I’d love to. Don’t worry, we’ll start on the easy stuff.” Her cheeks are pink with delight.

“Hey, you know, me too,” Alec says, glancing up from his computer screen, where he’s apparently just monitoring the location of Iris and Simon’s cell phone GPS. “You’ve made me put on the harness enough times that I can do it by myself now, but if I ever have to, I still only have half an idea of how to get into wherever I’m trying to go.”

Parker whirls away from Eliot and straddles Alec’s lap. “You hate and fear the harness,” she says, but she’s smiling. 

“Yeah, but I’ll still do it, if it needs doing. I might as well learn the rest of it. No telling when it might come in handy.”

She laughs a little maniacally, and kisses Alec, still grinning. “You guys are going to have so much fun,” she says breathlessly. “You’re going to wonder why you never thought to try it before!”

Eliot, who can’t help grinning at her delight, says, “You got to go easy on us at first, especially me. I’m an old dog; learning new tricks is tough.”

“You’ve got clever hands,” Parker says, dropping him a wink. “You’ll do fine.”

Parker goes to change into clothes that will work better under the leathers while Eliot gets Parker’s leathers stripped of obvious weapons -- four of the throwing knives that she has a nearly fetishistic love for hang on the inside of the jacket, and he leaves those, just because he knows she’ll feel better if he does -- and everything is jumbled together in the bag in a way that is going to make it a pain to sort out later, so maybe it’s a good thing they’ve got a room to do that in. Some of the stuff is mix and match, like most of the stakes, but Eliot’s short swords, a wakizashi and a chokutō, are not really interchangeable with any of the other short bladed weapons, as they are what he’s used to using for _Niten Ichi-ryū_ , the two bladed weapon style Hirota has been working with him on. Eventually. Eliot will be good enough that he can pick up any two short blades and manage, and could even -- possibly -- do that now, but in reality, he has a lot more skill with the two swords he’s been using in practice. He shoves a couple of throw pillows off the couch into the bag to keep it from clanking too obviously, until Alec sees what he’s doing and leaps to his feet to rescue the throw pillows.

“You do not use the decor as padding, Eliot,” he say, inspecting the pillows for damage. “These are not Ikea throw pillows, each one of them is unique in style and color and texture to complement our couch and accent the colors of the room,” he scolds, and then places the pillows carefully back on the couch. “Custom made,” he tells Eliot, his eyebrows in a furious slant, and disappears around the corner into the hall. He comes back carrying two dozen or so rolled up pieces of foam, each of them about two feet long, and when unrolled, three feet wide and two inches thick. He wraps the blades in them, holding the rolls closed with strips of duct tape. “Besides that, this is a pretty tough bag, but if you leave Parker’s throwing knives in there loose like that, not only are they going to get scratched up so that she kills you, the needle sharp point of at least one of them is going to poke its way through the bag until it makes a hole, and with our luck we’ll be in the lobby when the bag splits open and spills everything onto the floor.”

It honestly hadn’t occurred to Eliot -- most of the sharp things are in scabbards or sheaths of some kind -- but Alec is not wrong about Parker’s throwing knives, which live in loops and sheathes sewn into her leathers, and thus don’t have separate sheaths. He takes his scolding wordlessly, and when Alec gives him a look that means his suspicious of the silence, Eliot says, “You’re right, I didn’t even think about her throwing knives. And I’m sorry about the pillows. I’ll try to put more thought into it if we ever have to do this again.”

Alec looks mostly mollified. He turns back to the computer, just checking, and seems satisfied that their targets haven’t moved.

“Where did this foam even come from,” Eliot wonders aloud.

“Leftovers from padding under the mats in your little dojo room,” Alec says absently. Eliot, who had dragged the mats in on top of the concrete floor and called it good, feels a little silly at being touched that Alec had, at some point, decided that more padding was called for, and had clandestinely padded under the mats, probably when he’d installed the wood flooring and had the walls painted a soothing sand color. At the time, Eliot hadn’t seen the point, but Alec had said to make the place work, everything had to be finished off as a living space, and when Eliot had not immediately said anything, had confessed that Eliot’s concrete-floored, unpainted drywalled little workout room was depressing and it had made him feel like he was leaving the job half-finished, at which point Eliot had dropped to his knees and blown him, because he wasn’t always good with words, but the wood flooring and sand colors walls did make the workout room feel more like part of a home and less like a temporary arrangement, and a blow job had been all he could think to do to convey that to Alec. They had been in the room at the time, and in retrospect, Eliot feels like he should have noticed the extra padding under his knees.

Eliot leans forward and steals a soft kiss as Alec finishes wrapping up the last blade, and Alec, looking a little startled but pleased, kisses him back.

Then Alec has Parker watch the computer while he and Eliot go change into clothes that are more appropriate to wear under the leathers (as Eliot is wearing sweatpants, which, just, no, and Alec is in basketball shorts). Alec gathers a little bag of electronics together, his go-to stuff. There’s no telling if they’ll need it or not.

Once they are all in suitable attire, they leather up; Eliot is a little amazed at how much lighter the leathers are without the weight of stakes and whatnot weighing them down.

Alec transfers the tracking program from his laptop onto his phone, and says, “You know if they are out hunting and just left their phones in their ridiculously pricey room while they take the victim somewhere more pedestrian to kill him, this is going to be a colossal waste of time.”

Eliot considers that for a moment, and then shrugs. “We have to hope that isn’t what is happening, but if it is, there is nothing we can do about that. If they left their phones there, it means they’re probably going to go back there, and we’ll just wait for them. It’s not ideal, but since they’re paying for everything with cash, the chances of us being able to catch them at an actual crime scene before they have a chance to hurt anyone else is close to nil. We can only do the best we can do.”

Alec looks a little grim at the idea, but nods his agreement, and Parker rubs gently at the back of his neck.

“Okay,” Eliot says. “Everyone ready?”

Alec and Parker nod. They both look a little remote now, and it’s a look Eliot has become familiar with. It’s how they look when they’re getting ready to shed blood, and he’s glad to see it. This time, especially, they have to be ready for a hard fight.


	39. Chapter 39

The red blinking dot on Alec’s phone still hasn’t moved when they pull up and park on the street a couple of blocks from the hotel. They don’t want the van on the hotel’s security cameras if they can help it. Even still, Alec will try to get into the hotel’s system and wipe the nights security video if he can.

Eliot strides into the medium sized lobby, which is opulent yet tasteful, like he’s been there fifty times before, and flashes the desk clerk a confident smile. He tugs the Black AmEx from his wallet and slides it across the counter to her, and says, “Beaumont. Aaron.”

The desk clerk smiles uncertainly back at him, clearly a little taken aback by the leather, but goes to work on her computer without any real suspicion on her face. “Yes, the Oceanic Suite,” she says. She looks at all three of them. “I have the reservation here. The Suite does offer additional sleeping space in both the sofa and the loveseat.” She’s blushing even as she says it, like she somehow senses the three of them wouldn’t be using any additional sleeping space, and Eliot lets a lazy smile play on his lips.

“Good to know,” he says.

“I’ll need to see a picture I.D.” she says, her voice a little high, and Eliot slides his fake I.D. out of his wallet and passes it across to her. She compares the picture to Eliot, and then compares the signature on the license to the one on the back of the AmEx, and then types and slides the AmEx through the card reader, and passes them both back to him. “The, uh, young woman I spoke with regarding the reservation wasn’t sure how long you’d be staying with us, Mr. Beaumont?” she says, her eyes flicking to Parker, who is looking bored and empty headed as she lounges against the counter beside Eliot.

“At least until my bike is fixed,” Eliot says, and sees the young woman process that and accept it. “Maybe two days, three at the most.”

“That should be no problem, sir. Our kitchen is open at all times, so if you haven’t eaten yet, you should feel free to order at any time. Maid service is at your convenience, so any time you require it, just dial 0 to get the front desk and request it. Otherwise no staff will interrupt your stay. I hope you find your visit relaxing!”

She’s sounding much more chipper and like she’s reeling off the standard script at the end, and it’s clear she’s accepted them as just rich people who ride motorcycles, and thus not of very much interest.

“Thanks, we will, I’m sure,” Eliot says, and slides his cards back into his wallet. He accepts the three keycards she slides across the desk to him, signs the credit card receipt, and declines help with their bag.

They’re in room 318, so Eliot goes to the elevator -- only five floors total, not an undoable area to cover -- and pushes the up arrow. The three of them step inside when it opens, and they go to the third floor, just in case she’s looking at the little lights that indicate which floor the elevator is on. They even go into the room, if only to put down the bag of weapons and clasp their gorgets around their throats. Then they split up, Alec going down, carrying an ice bucket from their room, and Parker going up, Eliot staying on three, and they walk the halls.

They’re wearing earbuds more by habit than necessity, and they haven’t even been split up for more than two minutes when Parker says, “I have them, they’re in the penthouse. I can feel them from the elevator lobby on five.”

“Back to our room,” Eliot says, and is back there in under a minute, since he hadn’t even changed floors yet.

“How does a five story building even get to say it has a penthouse,” Alec mutters grumpily. By the time Parker and Alec get back to the room, Eliot is sorting weapons out onto the bed.

“You don’t need a key to access the penthouse from the elevator I take it?” Eliot asks.

“No, and the whole floor is the penthouse except for the elevator lobby, which is to be expected, but you never know.” She begins sliding stakes and blades into loops and sheathes. Alec is helping Eliot with the stuff he hasn’t got unwrapped from the foam yet. “They’re alone up there,” Parker says. She does not say _Thank God,_ but Eliot hears it anyway.

“Just taking a romantic incestuous sibling break from all that serial killing,” Alec says, his voice a little hollow.

“More likely still riding the high from the last one,” Eliot says. “And we’ll take our luck where we can get it. This way, at least there won’t be another one.” He begins to weapon up, feeling the way his body is ramping up, preparing for combat. It’s a familiar feeling, and actually a little comforting. Eliot is good at what he does. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t intend to be as cautious as he possibly can, but it’s part of his job to know that he’s good at his job.

“If he has a gun, we could be in real trouble,” Alec says. “He’s probably going to be faster than any vampire we’ve taken on.”

“There’s nothing we can do about that now,” Eliot says, unbuckling his belt so he can slide the sheaths of his swords onto it. “Even if he has one, he may be hesitant to use it. Too loud.”

“Except that he’s clearly crazy,” Parker says, which Eliot can’t argue with.

“I’ll try to close with him immediately,” Eliot says. “I’m better at disarming a gunman than either of you, and I’d be the one taking him on anyway, just because I have the most combat experience. Parker, you’re on Iris. Be careful of her gaze. I know it goes without saying, but still. You’re mentally the strongest of us, so I hope there is less chance of her being able to catch you up with her gaze, but avoid eye contact if possible. Alec, you are backing up whoever seems to need it. You’ve got reach on everyone, including both of them, so don’t forget to use it.”

“Got it,” Alec says tightly, and checks the draw on his long sword. “Any ideas about getting in the door?” he asks.

“Can you hack the card reader?” Eliot asks, and Alec makes a ‘bitch, please’ face, which Eliot can’t help smiling at. “Then we’ll do it that way, as quietly as possible.”

Alec sorts through the electronics in the small bag slung across his chest and plucks out a couple of things. “Are we coming back to this room?” he asks.

“We should if we can, just so we aren’t leaving weird shit behind us,” Eliot says. “But if we can’t, then we don’t worry about it.”

Alec nods, and twists the bag he’s got slung across his chest so that the bag part hangs down in the back.

“Is it going to hinder you?” Eliot asks.

“Nah, it’s small and light. I should be fine,” Alec says.

“Ready,” Parker announces, and Eliot checks her over automatically, making sure everything looks secure on her person. The last thing they need to drop and leave behind any kind of weapon.

He glances at Alec, who nods, his hand curled around the hilt of his long sword.

Eliot checks himself one last time. He has a brief fantasy of having an AR 15, just because this is one of the few times it wouldn’t bother him to use a gun, but shoves it out of his mind. It would be too loud in the hotel anyway. There’s no way to do this with even a modicum of stealth except by doing it up close and personal, and even then it’s going to make some noise. The hotel itself is on their side, though. It’s an older building, with a lot of thick carpeting and solid walls, and there are no other rooms on the penthouse floor, which means no neighbors on the other side of a wall that might hear them. It’s possible someone a floor down might hear the commotion, but there’s nothing they can really do about that.

“Alright,” he says. “Everyone has everything?” He asks because it’s a hold over reflex from his time in the Rangers, more than because he’s worried.

Alec and Parker both nod, and he nods back. “Okay. The stairs are are at the end of this hall, and it’s just less likely that we’ll meet anyone on the stairs than in the elevator.” He checks the draw on both his swords one more time, and they slide easily and freely in their sheaths. “Be careful,” he says, wishing he’d had more time to train them, knowing that no amount of time would have been enough to make him feel right about taking them into combat with him. It isn’t that they aren’t good. They are both good and getting better all the time. It’s just that it’s always been Eliot’s job to put himself in between them and danger.

They don’t meet anyone in the hall or on the stairs. The stairs on the penthouse floor open up right next to the doors of the elevator, and the elevator lobby is spacious and as opulent as the rest of the hotel, done in dark green and gold. The door to the penthouse suite looks like it’s made of solid oak. He’s glad Alec can hack it, because breaking it down would be noisy. He hopes the two vampires he can sense behind the door don’t have any of the interior locks engaged. He can break through a security chain or sliding bar without much trouble, but quieter is better.

Alec slips the edge of a slim tool that looks like a distant relative of a screwdriver between the edge of the security plate in the door and the wood, and works it back and forth in several places. After a minute or so, it sags a little away from the wood, leaving the outline of the plate on the door, the plate for the card reader itself held in place by several bundles of wires. Alec produces a pair of needle nosed pliers and snips several of the wires. The light on the front of the plate goes from red to green with a soft click, and Alec gives Eliot a quick nod, stowing his tools. “Shitty security,” he whispers, and gestures toward the door.

Eliot weighs the merits of stealth versus speed, thinks about the layout of their own suite, with it’s separate bedroom, and decides to go with stealth. If they can catch them off guard, their chances of success go up exponentially. It’s true in any fight, but he gets the feeling that it’s more true when going up against old and powerful vampires. He turns the knob slowly. It makes no noise in his hand, and he eases the door open, taking a quick look around the room, large, luxurious, couch and loveseat, two chairs, small dining area with four chairs, kitchenette entryway visible, though he can't see into the kitchenette itself. Short hall in the southeast corner of the room which undoubtedly leads to the bedroom or bedrooms, and is also the direction in which his senses are telling him that the vampires are in. He eases the door open all the way and doesn't worry too much about his boots making noise, as the carpet feels like it's about three inches thick. He eases inside, feels Parker and Alec following him, Alec catching the door and easing it silently closed again.

There is a low sound that it takes him a minute to place, but which he eventually realizes is the sound of a shower running, muted with distance, and feels a little thrill of triumph. Catching at least one of them unarmed and naked is a definite bonus.

There are clothes and things scattered around the main room, some still in bags, along with a long sword leaning against the end of the couch. He feels another little thrill at seeing it there. It doesn’t mean they don’t have other weapons, but it means there’s a chance that they don’t.

He leads the way through the main room and into the hall, the feel of the vampires getting close, and setting up a slight buzz in his mind. He realizes that he can sense the power of these two. Most of the vampires they’ve hunted have felt more or less the same to Eliot’s senses, but these two resonate somehow, and he just knows that it means that they’re older and stronger. Pre-battle tension sings through his muscles.

The hall is dark; there are three doors in it, two of which are open and lead to one smallish bedroom and a bathroom that isn’t all that fancy. Not the master bath, then, just a bathroom for guests. The door at the end of the hall is half open, light spilling out of the space between door and frame. The sound of the shower is louder in the hall. There are no voices, the two of them aren’t talking. Eliot glides as silently as he can to the partially open door. He can see that this is the master bedroom through the opening, chest of drawers, window with the dark curtains firmly shut with, maybe not surprisingly, duct tape affixing them to the walls all around the window frame. He can see half the bed, rumpled and unmade, and just barely, the lower curve of a woman’s bare leg. He moves slightly to one side so that Parker and Alec can both get a look.

He looks at Parker, points at her, and points at the partially visible leg. She nods. He looks at Alec, and gestures toward Parker. If Iris is in the bed, then it’s Simon who is naked and unarmed in the shower, and if there are weapons in the bedroom with them, they are most likely in the main room, not that bathroom. He wants Alec to stay with Parker, at least for now. Alec gives him a grim little nod, clearly not entirely satisfied with it, but probably able to follow Eliot’s line of reasoning well enough to figure out why.

Eliot takes another half step, so close he’s almost to the door frame. He sees a little more of Iris’s bare leg, though what he’s really looking for are weapons. If they have any in there, they are deeper in the room. Eliot can’t see them. It isn’t the first time he’s gone into a fight with this many unknowns, but he gets the feeling that this may be the most dangerous of those times.

He glances back at his partners, holds up three fingers, then two, then, one, and then he opens the door fully in one fluid motion, revealing the rest of the room all at once. Iris, on the bed, is not asleep, unfortunately, but seems to be painting her fingernails. She is a petite brunette, beautiful in a sharp kind of way, and naked on the bed. Her eyes widen and she opens her mouth to scream. Parker lunges past Eliot toward her, and throws a knife, which buries itself in her throat, cutting off the sound. Still, she rolls off the bed, grabbing at the knife and jerking it free, as though it is little more than an inconvenience, while dark blood pours from the wound.

Eliot doesn’t stick around to watch the rest. Parker’s knife will have silenced her for what will probably only be a short time, and he wants to take the other half of this demented duo by surprise. He angles for the open door of the master bathroom. Steam is billowing out of the room, and Eliot draws both of his swords as he enters the enormous bathroom. The shower doors are glass, and Simon looks up as soon as Eliot enters, seeing the movement. He snarls, and rips the shower door out of its fixtures, swinging the whole thing at Eliot like it’s a piece of board. Eliot turns, letting the glass hit his back, heavy, a solid hit that only doesn’t make him stumble because he’d set his feet for the impact. He has his arm up, elbow bent, protecting his face, as the glass shatters all around him. He feels a few sharp shards of glass pepper his raised hand, but the rest of him is protected by leather and the metal of the gorget, and he whirls around to face his attacker as soon as the glass stops falling around him. Simon, fangs bared, and at least an inch long, grabs at him, and Eliot drops into _Niten Ichi-ryū’s_ opening stance and slashes out with the blade in his right hand, swinging the blade in his left up to block Simon’s grab for him. Simon is still standing in the shower stall, water falling on him from the shower head, and Eliot’s first slash opens a gash in his chest from collar bone to belly, sending a gush of the vampires strange dark blood spilling from the wound. The grab he’d blocked with his other sword cuts open Simon’s right forearm, more blood splashing against the formerly pristine white surfaces of the bathroom. 

Simon snarls in pain and leaps, inhumanly fast, clearing the shower and is suddenly halfway across the bathroom where he would have landed right on top of Eliot if Eliot hadn’t already spun away, his body working almost independently of his brain, his training kicking in. Even still, the vampire is fast enough that he catches Eliot’s right wrist and twists. Hot pain jolts through his forearm, and Eliot hears the bone break. His chokutō falls free of suddenly numb fingers, and Eliot makes a desperate lunge with his other sword for Simon’s throat, thinking only that he doesn’t want the vampire to get his hands on Eliot’s fallen sword.

Simon slides to the side, graceful and feral, his eyes wide and Eliot has to jerk his gaze down and away as he feels the pull of Simon’s mental powers. Simon growls and lunges for him with both hands and his whole upper body, apparently either oblivious to the dropped weapon, or deciding not to bother with it. It’s a committed move, nothing that can be called back, and Eliot takes advantage of that commitment, stepping into the attack, getting close enough to drive the blade of his wakizashi into Simon’s chest, going for the heart, ignoring the pain shrieking up his right arm as well as he can. The blade goes in, a killing strike if Simon had been human. For a moment, Simon’s inhumanly strong hands close on Eliot’s throat and pull him in even closer. Simon twists and jerks his head forward, and Eliot feels him try to sink his fangs into Eliot’s throat, but the gorget protects him, and the silver coating does what they had all hoped it would do, which is to say, it hurts him when he tries to get past it, and he howls and leaps backward, pulling himself off of Eliot’s blade as he does so. Blood pours from the wound in his chest, but it clearly hadn’t been a killing blow, even with the silver coating the blade. Eliot will have to think about that later, plan around it, but for now he has no time to do anything but keep moving and keep fighting and keep ignoring the brilliant bursts of pain shooting through his right arm at every move Eliot makes.

Eliot swings his blade up and to one side, a little appalled at how lively Simon still seems to be after having taken a sword through his heart; his best bet is to try to disable him, even if he has to do it a piece at a time. His overhanded slice cuts through the top of Simon’s right shoulder and Eliot uses all of his considerable strength to drag the blade downward through his flesh. He hears the crunch of the blade shearing through bone in Simon’s shoulder, and a sharp crack as the effort Eliot had put into the swing sends it shearing through flesh far enough to cleave through Simon’s collar bone as well. Simon staggers backward, and Eliot jerks his sword free, stumbling back a little at the combination of the effort of pulling the blade free and the pain that the movement sends shooting through his broken arm. Dark blood wells up out of the wound, slow and thick, and Simon and the bathroom are both covered in that thick dark liquid. Simon shudders, and lunges forward, clumsily this time, and Eliot can’t help but feel a little rush of relief at seeing it; Eliot flicks his blade up, feinting as though going for Simon’s other shoulder, and Simon jerks to avoid the blow, but slowly, lacking that inhuman grace now. Eliot reverses the direction of the slice, and sweeps the blade through the big muscles in Simon’s thighs, getting both legs in one motion, feeling the edge of the blade grating across bone, and Simon shrieks and goes down to his knees. He’s trying to grab at Eliot even as he does it, and Eliot dances back, jarring his broken arm excruciatingly, and ignoring it as well as he can. He considers going for a beheading, but his good arm is broken, and while he does pretty well with both blades in practice, he isn’t sure enough of his precision with his left arm. He sheathes the wakizashi and grabs for a stake. Simon has fallen backward against the side of the stylish cupboards that have two sinks and all sorts of complimentary soaps and lotions scattered across the top of it. His fangs are still out, his eyes feral and furious, but he can’t stand up with both of his quadriceps severed, and he’s only got one good arm.

Even so, when Eliot bends to get a good angle with the stake, Simon grabs for him with his good arm, and Eliot has to knock it aside to take the shot. It’s a good shot, under the ribs on the left and angled up, and he puts his weight behind it to make sure it drives in deep enough, falling to his knees to do it. It takes him a few seconds to realize that the body beneath his has gone totally limp and still, and a few more for him to drag his gaze up to the face and see the slack mouth and open, glazed eyes. And even still, he levers himself up with his left arm, recovers his chokutō, and drags the body into a better position. He fumbles as he tries to sheath his chokutō one handed, on the right side with his left hand, but he gets it into its sheath. Then he unsheathes the fourteen inch steel and silver plated blade strapped to his left thigh, the one that he knows best and that feels the most comfortable in his hand, and swings it in a wide, downward slice. It takes him two tries. The blade gets hung up on the spine on the first swing, and he’s just not as good with his left hand. But then Simon’s head rolls away from his body, and Eliot is sure enough that he’s dead that he is willing to turn his back on the body and move into the master bedroom to check on Parker and Alec.

The two of them had done a much neater job on Iris. There is a stake still lodged in her chest, and the bed is soaked with the dark, dark red of her blood, but her head is already separated from her body, and Alec is examining Parker’s forearm, her jacket discarded beside the corpse on the bed. It looks like the vampire had managed to get her fangs through the leather of Parker’s jacket and had then worried at the flesh like a dog, deep punctures and long gashes, blood still welling up out of the wounds. Parker’s expression is a little tight with pain, but she seems otherwise okay.

“By the time I checked on you, you had him on the ground with a stake in your hand,” Alec says. “So I figured that meant you didn’t need help.”

“My right arm is broken,” Eliot says. “A clean break, I think, not a compound fracture, but it will need blood healing, and I suspect the only way to blood heal a break is to slice the arm open so you can get the blood to the bone, but other than that, I’m fine.”

Alec winces at that, but doesn’t offer any other suggestions, which means he probably can’t think of any.

Parker, however, says, “A lot of vampire blood might do it, according to what we know, and we’ve got two fairly powerful vampires right here.”

Eliot grimaces a little in distaste, but doesn’t argue. He should have thought to drink from Simon anyway.

Keeping his arm as still as possible, and keeping himself out of as much of the blood as he can, he makes his way back into the bathroom and takes a grip on Simon’s good arm, going for the bend of the elbow. Even as he does it, his fangs drop and he feels a clench of need that he hasn’t really felt since the first time he had fed. He bites down and drinks. Usually a half a dozen swallows is all he takes, all he needs, but this time he drinks more, a lot more, he’s not sure how much. He just drinks until the pain in his arm recedes, and while it still aches a little, it’s not the same kind of pain. When he finally pulls back, he carefully stretches out his right arm, then bends it, and while it doesn’t feel all the way healed, there is still some pain, it is better than it had been before. He can use it, at least, and maybe he wouldn’t have to slice his arm open for Parker and Alec to heal him the rest of the way. Maybe just drinking from them would be enough.

When he goes back into the master bedroom, Parker’s arm is healed except for a few fine, white scars.

“I think maybe just feeding from the two of you will take care of the rest of it,” Eliot says. “It’s still not right, but I can at least use it now. Feels like a break that has had some time to heal, but isn’t totally done healing yet.”

“It might have worked better if we’d done it while they were still alive,” Alec says thoughtfully.

“Yeah, well, I was too busy trying to keep him from killing me to think of it while he was still alive,” Eliot says. After a moment, he adds, “Though I don’t necessarily think you’re wrong. I know that I can’t heal my bite marks on him, since he’s dead,” he says. “So if the Master of the City takes a good look at the bodies, he’s going to know we fed off of them.”

“Can’t be helped,” Parker says. “We have to call him in for this clean up, or risk the authorities getting their hands on a couple of vampire corpses. There’s just no way for us to get them out into a place where the sun could get to them before some random person walked by and found them first.”

“Well, that’s something we can put in the pro column for having a relationship with the Master of the City,” Alec says. “If we can’t give the bodies to the sun, it’s in his best interests to clean up after us.”

“Would have been nice to know for the nest,” Parker says. 

“We’ll know next time,” Eliot says. “Let’s see if we can get back to our room and pack up the weapons, and then take one of the service entrances to get out. I’ll check out of the hotel tomorrow by phone.”

They don’t meet anyone on the way back to their extremely temporary and extremely expensive room, and they take turns cleaning up as best as they can and packing the weapons into the bag. Eliot’s arm aches, and he wishes for a couple of ibuprofen, before he realizes that if nobody has reported anything awry after the fight upstairs already, they probably don’t have to be in a big hurry to leave, and he says, “Alec, can I feed on you?”

“You think it will work that way?” Alec asks, but he’s already unhooking his gorget as he asks it.

“If it does with the vampire blood, I don’t see why it wouldn’t with yours,” Eliot says. “I’m not sure how much I need, but…”

Alec walks over and tips his chin up. “Usually I get orange juice and cookies if I donate blood, I want you to know,” he says, smiling.

Eliot laughs. “I promise you orange juice and cookies when we get home,” he says, and leans in close to Alec. His fangs drop, and he’s as careful as he can be to be gentle when he slides his fangs into Alec’s neck, but Alec is relaxed and apparently unworried, and actually pets Eliot’s hair a little as Eliot drinks from him. He takes more than he might usually take, but less than he really feels like he needs, but it’s enough to make his arm feel almost alright again. He pulls back and licks the puncture wounds closed. “Okay?” he asks, not really thinking he’d taken too much, but a little worried anyway.

“Fine,” Alec says. “How’s the arm?”

Eliot stretches it out, bends it, makes a fist. “Not perfect, but better. Just a low ache now.”

Parker says, “You can drink from me,” and tucks one of her knives, rolled up in foam, into the bag.

“The vampire drank from you, Parker,” Eliot objects. “I’m not going to drink from you on top of whatever she took.”

“She didn’t, though,” Parker says, unhooking her gorget and setting it aside. “She just bit me and shook my arm like a dog would shake a rabbit. She didn’t actually feed on me.”

Eliot gives her a dubious look.

She doesn’t seem impressed. “I’m completely healed from her attack from drinking her blood, and you’re not, after the vampire and Alec. I’m fine. So you might as well feed, so that you’re fine, too.”

Eliot sighs, twisting his arm and feeling a low jolt of pain still lurking in it. “I can use it if I have to, and it only hurts a little now.”

“And if we need your right arm because something freaky happens to us on the way home, and it’s weak because you were being stubborn, you’re going to feel really stupid,” Parker says, and flips her hair to one side.

As soon as she gets close, Eliot’s fangs drop, which he is betting is a sign from his body that it needs more blood to heal, since he isn’t the least bit turned on right now. “Yeah, okay,” he agrees, and tries to be as gentle as possible, and again takes a little more than he normally would, but when he is done, the pain in his arm is gone, even when he twists his wrist and flexes his forearm.

Parker grins at him. “See. I’m still fine, and you’re fine now, too. This is how it’s supposed to work.”

“You’re right. I’m stubborn. I’ll try to do better.”

She smiles at him, a wry twist to her lips. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she says, but there is no sting to it, just the underlying foundation of her knowing him, and not expecting him to be any different than how he is.

“Let’s get out of here,” Alec says. “I’m torn between getting on yelp and giving them a really bad review for vampire guests, or a really good review for excellent soundproofing.”

They make it out through the closest service entrance without seeing anyone, and then back to the van.

Parker is poking her fingers through the holes in the arm of her jacket. “I really liked this jacket, too,” she says sadly.

“We can get you another one just like it,” Alec says.

“What would be the fun in that?” she asks, sounding like she really doesn’t know. “Although I think I’ll order us each another set of leathers, so that we always have backups.” She smiles a little. “There were at least three more with cuts I liked. The only real pain is getting them customized for the knives and stakes.” She shrugs. “And it did its job. If she’d got my bare arm, it would have been worse, maybe even broken.”

“He hit me with the glass shower door,” Eliot says. “Just ripped it out of the wall, and bashed me with it. Without the leathers, I’m pretty sure I’d be bleeding from two dozen places or so.”

“We were lucky they weren’t really ready to fight,” Alec says. “We caught them naked and… and grooming themselves, and two of us still ended up injured.”

“No argument,” Eliot says, flexing his arm again just to check. “If they’d both been armed and ready for a fight, things could have gone much worse. They were strong.”

“The difference between hunting rogues versus hunting vampires who have had a couple of hundred years to learn to fight,” Alec says. “Though we are all three walking away from it under our own power, and none of us were permanently injured, so I count it a win.”

“It’s a win,” Eliot says. “But we should keep it in mind the next time we go out. The rogues are mostly young or untrained, but we can’t count on that always being the case. And while I don’t think we’re going to end up fighting a couple of serial killer vampires very often, it would be stupid to assume we won’t fight others that are just as strong, or stronger. Especially if we end up working with the Master of the City.”

“We’ve really just been lucky so far,” Parker says. “I know there are older rogues out there. They just go to more trouble to hide the bodies than the ones we’ve been tracking down. If you look up the list of vampires in the Bloodlines and Lineage document, it lists almost fifty ‘clanless’ vampires, and that’s only counting the ones that get reported as made and then that they have left the clan family. I don’t get the feeling that it’s always reported.”

“The making of them, or that they leave the clan?” Eliot asks.

“Both,” Parker says. “The laws say that the clan family Master is the only one allowed to make new vampires, and even then, they are only allowed to have a certain number of vampires under them without permission from the Master of the Territory. But that doesn’t mean the clan family Masters are the only ones capable of making new vampires. So there really is no way to tell how many rogues are out there or how old they are or what they are capable of. And then there are the lone vampires, that don’t belong to a clan family. They have to take oaths, too, and they are supposed to be answerable to the Master of the Territory, but in practice, keeping track of the lone vampires is probably pretty hard to do.”

“The lone vampires are different from the ‘clanless?’” Eliot asks.

“Yeah. The lone vampires are considered to be clans of one, really. All the clan family rules still apply. They just don’t want to live in a clan family for whatever reason. It’s relatively rare, say, maybe one in twenty or so. They become vampires, learn the laws, live with the clan family that made them for a while, and then they just decide they want to be loners. There’s a name that they call them in the histories, but it’s in Latin and I can’t remember it,” she says. “I’ll look it up later. The clanless are those that have been cast out of a clan. Mostly for being rogues, but occasionally for some other violation of vampire law. They’re the ones that are supposed to be taken care of by the vampire that created them, but are not, for reasons we’ve already gone into.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, that wasn’t my point. My point was, some of the clanless are pretty old. Some of them maybe don’t kill to live, and are just cast out. But some of them are rogues, but they’re older and smarter than the ones that we’ve tracked down and killed. They actually hide the bodies and vary their feeding patterns and such, so that the Daywalkers don’t find them. So, yeah. I’m just saying, that we should be aware that any vampire we end up hunting could be more powerful than the rogues that we’ve killed so far.”

“So we shouldn’t overestimate ourselves,” Alec says.

“No. Not exactly. We’re powerful. If we had had to take on the du Claire’s while they were ready for us, I still think we would have won. I’m not saying we’re overestimating ourselves. I’m saying we should be careful not to underestimate any vampire we encounter. That we should keep in mind that each one of them is potentially much stronger than the vampires that we have been hunting and taking down so far.” She cocks her head one way, and then the other. “I mean that we shouldn’t take for granted that a rogue is an easy target for the three of us.”

“Right,” Eliot says thoughtfully. “If we were only going after rogues, like most of the Daywalkers do, ones that are sloppy and leave clear signs and tend to hunt the same areas repeatedly, it would be pretty easy to fall into a pattern of thinking of them like they’re all the same, power-wise, and that’s a dangerous way to think.”

“Well, I won’t be forgetting how hard it was to take out these last two for a while,” Alec says.

“Getting hurt sucks, but it’s an object lesson,” Eliot says. “Maybe one we needed, even.”

They are silent for the rest of the ride back to the bunker.


	40. Chapter 40

The first thing they all do is clean their leathers and weapons and put them away. Then showers, and Eliot is glad that Alec had designed a shower big enough for all three of them to comfortably use at once. Aside from the waterfall, there are four separate shower heads, and plenty of room. Of course, there are two other bathrooms in the bunker, so it’s not like they _have_ to share. But it’s not about what they _have_ to do, and Parker purrs when you scrub her back and Alec likes to wash Eliot’s hair, and Eliot likes how being with them makes taking a shower less like something you do because you have to and more like something you do because it’s relaxing and there is good company. Though he doesn’t complain about getting his hair washed, either.

Eliot makes sure Alec gets orange juice and cookies, and even cajoles Parker into having a glass and a couple of cookies, too, just in case.

“No offense to your blood donation offerings, Eliot. They’re just as good as the Red Cross would give. But I’m fracking starving,” Alec says after he’s eaten at least half a dozen cookies.

“Me too,” Parker says. “I want some kind of pasta with meat and lots of melted cheese.”

So Eliot makes them a very late dinner, steaks with an alfredo pasta dish on the side covered in a layer of melted parmesan, because he wants to feed them red meat just in case they need the iron. Neither of them mention it, but Parker’s eyes dance with merry understanding. He ignores it, because there are worse things than Parker guessing his ulterior motives for serving them steaks past midnight.

“Are you going to call the Master?” Parker asks, after she’s eaten all of her steak and stolen a couple of bites off of both of their plates as well.

“I should,” Eliot says, feeling kind of ambivalent about it. Considering the carnage they’d left behind, sooner is probably better than later, to give the vampire clean up crew or whoever plenty of time to find a way to haul the bodies away and get rid of evidence. He honestly just doesn’t want to have to give the Master of the City a blow by blow.

Then he realizes he doesn’t have to give the Master of the City a blow by blow if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t work for the man. Vampire. Whatever. He isn’t _Eliot’s_ Master. It’s not like they’re getting paid for this job. He doesn’t owe an explanation as to how it was done. Just that it was done.

He picks up the burner phone and dials the number for the Master of the City.

“Good evening,” the Master of the City answers the phone, and Eliot actually has to bite down on a short, harsh little laugh that wants to escape him at the idea of a vampire answering the phone with that particular horror movie matinee stock phrase.

“Am I speaking to the Master of the City?” Eliot asks, though he’s pretty sure he is. Eliot is pretty good at remembering voices.

“You are,” he says. “And am I speaking with Eliot, the Sun Walker?”

“Yes, it’s Eliot,” Eliot confirms. “Iris and Simon du Claire are dead. You’ll find their bodies in the penthouse of the Glenclaive Hotel. Do you need me to give you an address?”

“Not necessary, I am familiar with the establishment,” the Master of the City says, not sounding especially happy. “You are… uninjured?”

“I’m fine. The place is a mess, though. I don’t know what you guys do to get rid of evidence, but there is a lot of blood. Just in case you need to know that,” Eliot says.

“I would have presumed it to be so, but appreciate the information, nevertheless,” the Master of the City says. “Did you recruit assistance?”

“I don’t see that it matters,” Eliot says. “As long as the job got done.”

“You do not wish me to know how powerful you might be,” the Master of the City says, with the slightest hint of accusation in his voice.

“Not especially, no,” Eliot says.

“I do not suppose I blame you,” the Master of the City says, though now he sounds a little put upon. “Your assistance in this matter is very much appreciated. You have potentially saved human lives by acting with such alacrity, and by notifying me of the location of the… incident, you have proved a willingness to act with discretion. Is there a way I may reliably reach you in the future, should I find myself in need of your… resources?”

“I’ll text you an email address,” Eliot says. “And I’ll make sure to check it every day.”

“That will do,” the Master of the City says, though he doesn’t sound totally pleased about it. “If you have need of help in disposing of the corpses of the clanless, you may contact me, either at this number, or at the email address I will send to you when I receive an address from you to contact you with.”

“That could come in handy in the future, if I don’t have the option of leaving a body out in the sun,” Eliot says. “Thank you.”

“No, I must thank you,” the Master of the City says. “I do not lightly offer my thanks, or my help. You have done the city a great service in ridding it of the du Claire’s, and you have done me a great personal service. I will admit to surprise and uneasiness in the matter of how you were able to discover who I am and how to contact me, but I have resolved to count the quality as an advantage to having you as a potential future ally, at least until I have reason to feel otherwise.”

“That was a very polite way to warn me that you consider me a possible danger,” Eliot says, amused. “If I wanted to come gunning for you, I would never have let you know I existed until we met in person. I have no beef with any vampire that lives under the laws. I would prefer it if one of the laws didn’t give you or any other vampire permission to kill me on sight, but I understand why the law exists.”

“We do not hunt you, you know,” the Master of the City says, almost conversationally. “It is not something we tell our people to do. You perform a sort of function for us. The law is merely there to protect any vampire that obeys the laws from punishment, if he or she is forced to kill a Daywalker to protect themselves.”

“Isn’t that pretty much covered in the law that allows you to kill in self defense?” Eliot asks, but then doesn’t wait for an answer. “I believe that you haven’t made it your top priority to hunt down and kill off Daywalkers. It’s still something you teach the newly turned that they are allowed to do, though, and I’d like it if that weren’t the case. Maybe we can work on that. For now, though, I did this to save human lives, and I reported it to you to allow you to protect yourselves from discovery. Like I said, I have no beef with those of you who live under the laws.”

“Both very good reasons,” the Master of the City says. “Changing the law is not within my power. If you understand any of the structure that governs us, you must know that.”

“I do know that,” Eliot says. “But I have to start somewhere, and you happen to be the Master vampire that takes care of my city.”

“I will, at least, make note of what you have said in my report to the Vampire Council,” the Master of the City says. “I doubt it will change the laws, and am myself unsure that they should be changed, but I will convey your words to more powerful ears than my own.”

“I appreciate that,” Eliot says. “I’ll send you an email address within the hour.”

“I will watch for it,” the Master of the City says, and ends the call.

“Alec,” Eliot says, and Alec waves him off, already settling down at his computer.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it,” he says. “Untraceable email for vampire business in progress.” He gestures toward Eliot, wiggling his fingers. “Give me the burner phone, and I’ll text him the address when I have it ready.”

Eliot passes the burner phone over, and then allows himself to flop back onto the couch. Now that the adrenaline has worked it’s way most of the way out of his system and he’s had a fairly heavy meal, he’s tired. He flexes and twists his right arm, just checking, and works really hard not to remember the sickeningly bright jolt of pain of it breaking. It’s not the first time he’s broken a bone, but it actually hasn’t happened to him all that often considering his life, and usually when it does happen, it’s fingers and toes. As a kid he’d broken a leg, but it was so long ago that almost the only thing he remembers about it is that the cast had itched like a mother.

What really bothers him is how easily the vampire had done it. The twist of his wrist, and the snap of the bone breaking, are going to be things he dwells on when he can’t sleep at night, he knows it. It hardly matters that he knows he could break someone’s arm just as easily, in the same circumstances. It’s just the first time it has happened to him like that. That’s going to bother him. He’s spent too long being faster, stronger, and better trained than anyone or anything he’s had to fight. He was right in the van about it being the kind of object lesson that might have been needed.

Parker flops down on the couch next to him, slings one of her legs over both of his thighs, and slides her upper body sideways until she’s resting her cheek against his chest. Almost automatically, he lifts one hand and brushes her hair away from her face, but he doesn’t try to hold her. If Parker is feeling cuddlesome, you have to let her cuddle you. If you try to cuddle back, she usually gets restless and pulls away. He knows she knows that she does it, and he knows that she tries not to, and it breaks his heart a little that she feels like she has to try to let herself be cuddled when it’s so obviously not something she likes. He’s tried several times to find the right words to tell her she doesn’t have to like being cuddled, that it’s not a requirement, but has never managed to find them. Instead, he just lets himself be cuddled when she feels like it, and resists the impulse to pull her in close.

“How does your arm feel?” she asks, sounding drowsy, her words a little muffled from the way she has her face pressed against his chest.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it’s as good as new.”

“You keep…” she says, and fists one hand, stretching out her arm, and then twisting it and flexing it. “I wondered if it was still hurting.”

“No. I think I’m just reassuring myself that it’s not still hurting,” Eliot confesses.

“Okay, then you should carry me to bed,” she says, and smothers a yawn against his t-shirt.

He smiles a little, but turns to get a good angle, slides his arms behind her knees and under her shoulders, and lifts her up. She’s completely dead weight, not even slinging her arms around his neck for support, but she’s not really all that heavy, and he’s a little charmed anyway, so he doesn’t comment, just carries her into their bedroom and lays her on the bed. When she doesn’t move to undress, he undresses her gently, and then eases her under the comforter. She murmurs something muddled which might have been a thank you or might just as easily have been a complaint, but she’s so close to being asleep that Eliot doesn’t bother to try to figure out which it had been.

Tucking Parker in does something pleasant to his chest, like it tightens and then relaxes all at once, spreading warmth in its wake. She can be hard to read, but she’s easier to be with than she thinks she is. You just have to remember to pay attention to her physical cues, and trust that she wants what she says she wants.

He ponders climbing in next to her, but he hadn’t even said good night to Alec, so wanders back out into the spacious living area instead.

Alec has a slightly crooked smile on his face. “Are you going to carry me to bed, too?” he asks.

“I could probably manage it,” Eliot says. “You’re a lot taller than Parker is, so I might end up knocking your head against a door frame or something.”

“Fair enough,” Alec says. “I’ve got the email set up, and the address sent to the Master of the City. He’s already sent you-slash-us a formal thank you note for assisting with the ‘incident,’ so now we have his public email if we need it. I’ve set it up to ping my phone or tablet if we get any mail in that account, but you should memorize the address and password, too, so that more than one of us can access it, just in case.”

“Tomorrow,” Eliot says, struggling to resist a yawn. “Come to bed.”

Alec gives him an amused look, but shuts down his laptop and stands up, gesturing for Eliot to lead the way. Eliot does. Parker is already breathing deeply and evenly, and the two of them undress quietly and ease their way into bed, so as not to wake her. Alec turns to face him in bed, catching his hand and squeezing it briefly. Eliot smiles, though Alec probably can’t see it in the darkness, and squeezes back. He turns onto his other side so that Alec can spoon him, because that’s what Alec really wants. The press of a body against his own, as a reassurance, because they had won, but not without paying for it. Since Eliot can sleep in almost any position, he doesn’t mind Alec scooting close and slinging an arm around his waist, brow tucked up against Eliot’s shoulder.

By all rights, the things that had gone wrong for them during that fight should have kept him up, but it doesn’t. Not that night, anyhow.


	41. Chapter 41

They sleep late, and then Nate calls with a job, and vampire business is mostly back-burnered while they set up a con to take down a televangelist who supposedly donates all of the money he gets from his nation-wide congregation into missionary work in Africa, but really routes it into a gambling habit that has him almost six figures in the hole. It takes a little more time and a lot more grifting from not just Sophie, but from Eliot and Parker, than usual, but the Reverend McKinnley ends up confessing on live national T.V.

Depressingly, his congregation rallies around him, donating huge sums of money to help pay off his gambling debts, which is not a very satisfying end to the con, though he does get arrested for fraud and money laundering, which somehow doesn’t seem to put a dent in the faith of most of those donating money to him.

Parker hates everything about the con, and Eliot isn’t too thrilled about it either, and also has to talk her down from stealing the subsequent donations he receives and donating them to a shelter that houses elderly cats. It’s especially hard, because he’s emotionally in favor of using the money for something along those lines, but intellectually knows that several government agencies will be keeping a close eye on that money for some time to come. He ends up having to promise her, in writing, that in one year they can revisit his finances and steal everything he has, if it’s remotely safe to do so.

Still, Parker is considerably cheered by the possibility of fleecing him at some future date when he will not be expecting it.

They still sort through files they haven’t gone through or have only skimmed since stealing them from Ipsilon in their down time, but they don’t have time for vampire tracking or serious discussion about what to do about the Daywalkers and the archive for several days.

When the job is finally over, they spend most of an entire day in bed, a large part of that tormenting Alec with his new nipple piercings, just because it isn’t something they’ve had long stretches of time to devote to before, and finally get up in the evening on a Monday, and Alec cooks breakfast-for-dinner, which is one of his specialities.

After dinner is when all the serious discussion about what to do with or about the archive comes up. Alec has several provisional plans, the first and simplest of which, is to post parts of what they know on the existing archive -- the fact that most vampires live by laws forbidding them to kill humans, and some things like that, basic things, the complicated history of the vampires past relationship with the Sun Walkers not even entering into it yet -- just to see if it gets taken down by whomever controls the archive. After all, it _is_ possible that whoever controls the information available on the archive genuinely isn’t aware that there are vampires out there that don’t kill when they feed. Even if that’s the case, it’s hard to tell whether or not the Daywalkers in general will make an effort not to kill vampires that aren’t killing humans. The tone of the comments in the archive aren’t exactly violently anti-vampire. There aren’t many long rants posted about vampires being evil or demonic or a blight upon the face of humanity. Most of them read like war stories to Eliot. Just people that need to tell someone about the fear and the injuries and the intensity of combat.

Alec cautiously suggests that that’s a good sign, while Eliot secretly thinks that it’s more likely that the Daywalkers simply don’t think that deeply about the vampires, or their motivations. He thinks that they equate vampires with dangerous animals, and the lack of hate speech is more of a symptom of a larger disease. After all, you don’t see hunters posting rants about the evils of bears or wolves on hunting sights for the most part, because hunters don’t assign human thoughts or values to wild animals. He thinks the lack of hate speech has more to do with the fact that Daywalkers consider vampires to be _things_ , rather than assigning them any kind of human qualities or virtues.

He doesn’t object to Alec’s plan, though, because he could be wrong, and is even willing to hope that he’s wrong about at least some of the Daywalkers out there.

So Alec makes the post, and within twenty-four hours, there is enough hate speech in the comments to the post to make Eliot feel tired, and to make Alec look grimly disappointed. For a while, Alec actually replies to these posts, making well-reasoned and informative responses, but Eliot finally makes him stop when the hate speech turns away from vampires and begins to be directed at Alec (Eliot, technically, since it’s his log in, but it’s Alec who starts to wilt a little at having that vitriol pointed at him).

Alec retreats into World of Warcraft for a little while, and Eliot uses one of the other laptops to log in and look at the responses, curious to know who the main participants are, and what arguments they’re using. He’s at least a little gratified to notice that not all of the comments to Alec’s post are hate-fueled rhetoric. Some of them, maybe as many as half, are asking questions, both about how Alec knows this, and about what it means as far as the way they hunt vampires is concerned. It doesn’t seem like as many, because the comments of the vampire haters are lengthier and several of them had posted multiple replies to the post, when the comment box hadn’t proved long enough to contain the extent of their outrage.

Eliot carefully goes through and answers all the real questions as well as he can without giving away any of their secrets. A few more real questions pop up while he’s laboriously doing this, along with a few more rants about vampires being nothing but mindless monsters that only look like people. He answers all the questions, and ignores all the rants. He puts it away, finally, because it’s almost as hard to pass on real information as it is to read the enraged responses. He’ll keep tabs on it, he decides, though, because some of them had seemed to really want to know what to do with the knowledge that not all vampires are inherently evil, and some few had seemed to already know. They are few and far between, but there are a few comments that agree with Alec’s post, that say they’ve seen vampires that were feeding without killing, or that they suspected there had to be some kind of laws that protected humans because otherwise there would be a lot more dead humans.

He seriously considers making a follow up post noting that the ratio of human deaths to active vampires is actually pretty low, but doing so would require him to expand on how he’d obtained his source information, and he isn’t willing to cop to having a document that lists pretty much every vampire in the country.

He can’t quite stop himself from making a pair of lists of code names, though, comprising those that had actually asked questions or had related experiences with vampires that indicated that they didn’t always kill to feed, and of the haters. The list of haters is longer, but not by as much as Eliot would have guessed.

Parker, who had spent most of the evening with her throwing knives, comes in and looks at the two of them. “So,” she says. “Did not go as well as we might have hoped?”

Alec, who is a lot more mellow after a couple of hours of World of Warcraft, says, “It was a mixed response. More Daywalkers than I hoped were… not open to the idea of taking care to only hunt vampires that kill to feed. Were not, in fact, even open to the idea that such vampires exist. But there were some that were more open to the idea. At this point, I’m mostly interested in whether or not they’ll pull down the post itself.”

Eliot was interested in that as well. When he opens his mouth, what he says surprises him almost as much as it surprises Parker and Alec. “I want you to get started on a separate website.”

Alec’s brows arch. “It’s a little soon to discard this one out of hand,” he says, more as if he’s thoughtful about the idea than like he’s actually objecting to it.

“Yes, but.” Eliot thinks for a minute, trying to think about what he wants to say. “We don’t have a _community_ of Daywalkers,” he says finally. “We have a loose association that exchange horror stories and tactical information, bloody confessions and tricks of the trade. Backing that up is the basic archive posts, the one that explains what vampires are and what they can do, the one that explains how we -- or they, at least -- became Daywalkers, and what it means as far as their enhanced physicalities go, the one that explains how to hunt vampires and what to use to kill them. The one that gives information on how to get in touch with weapons dealers that can get you the kinds of things that will be effective against vampires. All of those posts are the first things posted, going by the timestamps. Everything else came after. We don’t know what person or group initiated those posts.”

He stands up and paces around the room for a few seconds, then turns back. “I think that eventually we will have to find out who started the archive, and either convince them of the truth of what we say in our posts, or possibly, if they already know the truth, and are leaving these big gaps in the database that the average Daywalker is using to build his or her own knowledge base on purpose, we might have to stop them. I haven’t gotten as far as how we would do that yet. The alternatives are all pretty grim, and I’m not ready to go there as our first option, if you get what I’m saying?” He makes it a question.

Parker is frowning a little, but not as though she disagrees. Alec is just listening intently. They both nod, understanding what he isn’t saying, what he doesn’t even want to be thinking, but which it may come down to.

“Since I’m not prepared to start there, it makes sense to start at the other end,” he says, and sighs a little. “Build our own website. Try to get the information on how to get to it out to all the registered users of this website, whether they agree with us or not, but _starting_ with those that seem to have it in them to be reasonable about the idea. And on it, we post… all there is to know that we can post without actively endangering the lives of any vampire in particular. By which I mean, we will also have the section about becoming a daywalker, about what a vampire is, about how to kill a vampire, about how to get in touch with specialty weapon makers, but also the laws, all of them, even the ones that don’t have anything to do with humans. It makes a difference because…” He fumbles for the words to articulate what he means to say.

“Because it establishes them as having their own community, their own laws, and it… humanizes them. It shows them as something other than just monsters that prey on human beings,” Alec says.

Eliot points to him. “Yes, that. And we will have to sanitize or summarize the history, but we should put that up there, too. We should put up what we know about how their governing bodies, without giving out names of any of the vampires in them. And we should post what we know about how they train vampires to control their craving for blood, what _I_ know from Jairo’s mind about how they teach vampires not to become killers. We can even post some statistics, as far as how many vampires live in New York or L.A. We should post about the clanless. And then when it’s set up, we should try to pass on the website information to the people that already use the current archive. All of them, if we can do it, even if each of us has to monitor the website in shifts for a few days and give them the info in chat boxes one at a time. And we should also have a place you can post if you have more going on than you can handle, where you can request help. It won’t be quite as anonymous as the archive, though we will still assign and track user names, but we won’t require the extra step of having been given a file number that lets you get your foot in the door. It will be extra work for Alec, but I’m pretty sure he can keep people who don’t belong off of the site.”

“It won’t be much extra work,” Alec says. “We can make the usernames the Daywalkers initially get have to go through an approval stage, answering a series of questions that only a Daywalker would know, or during the first press of people, when we actually pass on the data for the new website once it’s up, which, by the way, we will _not_ have to hand out to one user at a time, I promise, but during first start up, we can require only that they have a log in for the archive, so that the first time they log in, they use their log in from the archive to do it, and then go into user options and choose a new username and password and whatnot. We can set up profile page, if you want, that will let them give a little bit of information about themselves, such as what area of the country they work in. They may not use it at first. They’re used to being secretive even to each other. But once a few people do ask for backup and get it, and post about it on the site, more people will start filling that kind of stuff in.” Alec nods. “None of this is going to be even hard,” he says. “You want to build a community, or a network at least, of Daywalkers. The archive does that a little bit, but you want to phase it carefully out into the real world. Not that the Daywalkers will necessarily get together and have meetings or anything like that, though stranger things have happened on the internet, I assure you, but just enough that if there is a 60 vamp nest in a major metropolitan city, the Daywalker that first spots it can ask for help on the website, and probably get it. A few of them have got together before to take down nests, by the way,” Alec adds. “I get the idea that a few of them in some of the more densely populated areas of the country know each other at least well enough to have exchanged more than just usernames. And some of them that have been active on the site for more than a year or two. They group up some in discussions, if you read through the posts and responses. There is the start of a community already there.”

“You just want to move it into an environment that encourages it to grow,” Parker says. “I’m not sure it’s all that more effective than taking over the current archive by force. So to speak. Computer force, I mean. Not like beating anyone up.”

“Maybe Alec could do that,” Eliot says. “But the server that hosts the site would not be in our hands, and that limits our control over it as it exists now. Daywalkers we don’t know have administrative rights over parts of the archive, and could conceivably undo anything we managed to do, depending on how they stack up against Alec in computer savvy.” Alec makes a disgruntled, dismissive sound, but doesn’t argue. “It isn’t just that, though. Changing sites is like announcing a change in management. The users will know that the new site is not being run by the same group that ran the old site. And we are going to be much freer with the information that we have, as well. Not totally transparent, because that puts too many vampires in danger that most likely don’t deserve to be put in that kind of danger. But still, a lot more information available to the ones that want it.”

“How are you planning to explain how we got this information?” Alec asks. “Somebody is going to ask.”

“Honestly, I think we should tell the truth. That we broke into a clan families database and stole it,” Eliot says. “We should caveat that with how extremely dangerous it was, and how it almost went to hell because we didn’t have all the information there was on all the inhabitants of the clan families lair, but otherwise I don’t think we need to lie about it. Evade a little, but not outright lie.”

“If there are any vampire moles in the current archive that manage to make their way across to our website, which I think is extremely possible, that might not be the best way to do it,” Alec says. “Maybe better to say we have a source.”

Eliot frowns. “I don’t like the ‘anonymous source’ ploy. It’s too flimsy, and could be used against us. As in, how do you know this anonymous source is telling the truth about the vampire laws? Something closer to the truth would be better.”

“I’ll think about it,” Alec says. “I’ll come up with something, or the three of us will brainstorm it. If we can’t come up with anything better, we go for part of the truth, but we don’t admit to breaking into a clan family home. We claim to have recovered the data from a flash drive on a dead vamp, before we do that. Admitting to the break in will cause all the clan families to check their hardware, for one thing, if there is any vampire activity on the site. Even Ipsilon would check their server, and that would lead them to this city, though not to us directly. Even still, I don’t want them focusing on even just the city. The Master of the City, at least, would probably suspect Eliot the Sun Walker, now that you’ve made contact. Better if they think we have stumbled across the information and have researched it a little to fact check what we can, than to admit to breaking into a clan families lair. The Daywalkers might think that is super cool of us to do, Eliot, but any vampire that found out about it would go to red alert. Their lairs are sacred.”

“Okay, okay. Strike that dumb plan from the record,” Eliot says a little irritably.

Alec holds up both hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger, man,” he says. “I’m just telling you how I would react if I thought someone had broken into one of our places, not just this one, but any of them. All three of us would be hyper-alert, and we’d have good reason to be. We have taken pains to make sure those places can’t be traced back to us. The vampires have done the same thing, possibly even more stringently. You and me and Parker sleep, but we’re not helpless the way that they are during the day, even when we sleep. They would freak out, as a group, which is the last thing we want. If there is a vampire wandering around our website, we want that vampire to see that we’re not working against them. We want them to see that we are in favor of being careful and not killing law-abiding vampires by mistake. As long as we don’t put anything on the site that puts them at risk, having a vampire on our site might actually work in our favor.” Alec shrugs. “Not entirely sure, because they’re kinda on the paranoid side, but even if it doesn’t work in our favor, I don’t think it can hurt us much.”

“I have to take your word for it,” Eliot says. “I don’t know enough about building websites or even building online communities to be able to argue your experience on the matter. So, we’ll think of something else to tell them about how we got the information.” Then: “I’m sorry I snapped.”

Alec smiles a little. “You didn’t snap. You just started to get a little bristly, and don’t worry about it. You always do it a little bit when you’re working outside your comfort zone.”

Eliot sighs. “Is this going to work?” he asks Alec, because Eliot doesn’t even have a facebook, although he understands what social networking is and what it’s used for. They’ve used such things in cons before. But he’s never tried to engineer a specific group of people into something more interactive and coherent, and it wouldn’t surprise him if Alec told him he was doing the whole thing wrong.

“It has the potential to work,” Alec says seriously. “A fairly good amount of potential, I’d say. We’ll have some ‘all vampires are monsters’ guys that we’d rather be able to get rid of, but are just going to have to work around. Every social and networking site out there has its trolls. And a few won’t come over at all, or maybe will wait a long time to come over. But I think most of them will at least come to check the website out, and once they do, if they have any interest at all in the history of vampires, they’ll stay. I think that history is our big hook, honestly. The laws are more important, and are going to make the Daywalkers actually admit that the vampires have a functioning society, apart from the rogues that we see most commonly, but even if we summarize the history all the way down to the origin story and only punctuate the summary with big events, it’s still going to be the thing they find the most fascinating. And they will have almost total access to the site in a way that they don’t have the archives. They probably won’t realize it until they figure out they’re allowed to do things on this site that they couldn’t do on the archive, but it’s stuff they’ll want to do, once they realize that they can.”

“Okay,” Eliot says. “How long will it take?”

“Honestly, having someone carve down the history into something readable is going to take the longest amount of time,” Alec says.

“Oh,” Parker says. “I have kind of already been doing that a little. I mean, the language needs work, but I made a timeline and have been pulling the important chunks out of the narrative to match up with the timeline. We’ll all three want to look at it when I’m done and make sure it isn’t going to cause any security issues, but I was doing it, just, you know, for me. Putting it in plain language and organizing it into something I could use as a reference type book, in case we needed to check for dates or latin phrases for things.” Her cheeks are a little pink. “Plus I figured you’d both want to really read it, instead of getting it second hand from me, so I was just making it easier to read.”

Because she seems to be embarrassed about it for some reason, Eliot avoids expressing surprise or gratitude. Instead he just asks, “How long do you think it will take you to get it done?”

“Two or three days, if I’m moderately productive. Less time if we need it in a hurry.” She looks at Alec. “Do we need it in a hurry?”

“No. I have the parts I need, and it won’t take me long to build a server to store it on, but I’ll want to be a little creative in how I choose a service provider to host it. The website itself is the easiest part. I can get it together in two or three days, I think. Maybe a little more if I have to hack some back doors into service providers.” Alec laces his fingers together, palms out, and stretches his arms. “Then it’s just a matter of luring over the Daywalkers. I’ll know more about that once I see if they pull my post within the next day or so.”

“How are you going to get the web address to all the users?” Eliot asks, genuinely curious.

“I’m going to hack their chat feature,” Alec says. “It is its own little separate java program that runs within the web page, and I can hack it so that as soon as a user logs on, they get a chatbox popup with the new web address in it. I’ll tangle it all up in the roots of the program, so that it will take them at least a week to get it stop doing it. Then, depending if your log in is still active, I’ll make an actual post with the web address in it, and this time I would really be hacking, but I’m pretty sure I can make it so they can’t remove the post without tearing down the main page and putting it back together again. By that time, most of them will have seen it.” He looks at Eliot. “Any idea what you want to call the site? I was thinking of going with something simple and easy for your average internet user to recognize. Like Vamp-Wiki.”

“I have no opinion on what to call it, so that should be fine,” Eliot says. “Most of what you’re doing is over my head. So.”

“How are you going to keep yourself occupied while Alec and I work on this,” Parker asks.

Eliot runs his fingers through his hair. “I have no idea. Be here for when my opinion is requested, I guess.”

It turns out to be three of the most boring days Eliot has spent lately, and that’s including the days that the three of them had done nothing but vampire research. Parker and Alec do have occasional questions for him, ask opinions of him, but both of them are good at what they do, and don’t really require his help. Eliot does chin ups on the bar built into his little dojo’s doorway until he is literally trembling with muscle fatigue, and makes elaborate lunches and dinners because he has nothing better to do with his time. He half wishes Nate would call them for a job because he’s bored, even as he’s grateful that Nate doesn’t call at the same time, because getting this done sooner is better than later.


	42. Chapter 42

By about eight o’clock of the second day, he is lounging sideways on the couch, reading Parker’s copy of Playboy -- she claims she had subscribed because she’s bi, and then had been mostly disappointed to discover that none of the girls looked like real people, but had never bothered to unsubscribe -- when Alec calls him over and asks him about color combinations on the website.

Eliot just looks at him, and Alec sighs. “Your brooding around the place is really harshing my bliss at good hacking,” he says. “Why don’t you go out or something?”

From the couch, Parker makes a low noise of agreement.

Eliot is a little stung, though he is self-aware enough to know that his being here really isn’t doing any of the three of them any good. “Go out where?”

“Go dancing, or something. Or go hang out with Nate and Sophie,” Parker says. Then she looks up, eyes wide, and says excitedly, “Or call your little Spanish vampire boy!” she exclaims, sounding like she thinks this is the best idea ever. “Take him to the kind of club you really like to dance at, spend the night with him, find out what it’s like to have sex with a vampire.” Her eyes are positively sparkling. “And then come home and tell us all about it.”

“That’s a good idea,” Alec says, sounding almost equally enthused. “And if he’s any good, and has any interest, you might mention that he’d be welcome to join the three of us sometime, though it’s not a requirement or anything.”

Eliot stands there for a long moment, silently pondering getting kicked out of the house by his two lovers in order to go have experimental sex with a member of the undead. Once he gets past being slightly offended at being kicked out of his own house (it doesn’t take him long, because he is bored with being here anyway, and Alec and Eliot really don’t need him for what they’re doing), he drums his fingers on his thigh, thinking it through. Is this something he really wants to go through with? He doesn’t try to pretend he isn’t staggeringly attracted to Jairo, but Jairo is a vampire, and Eliot is in a relationship with Parker and Alec. He’s never slept around while he was in a relationship before, and it feels a little weird to be considering it, but. He doesn’t doubt their devotion to him or his devotion to them. And he doesn’t doubt that they are sincere when they suggest that he go out with Jairo and get lucky if he can. If anything, Parker is actually turned on by the idea. Alec is a little harder to sense, but only because he’s deeply involved with what he’s doing on the computer, and thus feels a little distant in the link anyway. It’s definitely not something that’s causing him any worry, though.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” he asks, because the links are great, but not a replacement for actual communication.

Parker just grins and says, “I bet he bites you during sex. I wonder if he’d notice if you bit him back.”

Alec says, “You clearly want him, man. Go to it. It’s got to be more fun for you than watching us do grunt work. Although, I’m with Parker, I’m going to want to hear all about it.”

“I am actually going to do this,” Eliot says, taking his phone out. “I’m about to dial right now.”

“Have fun, wear a condom,” Parker says. “There are some in the hall bathroom.”

Eliot scrolls through his contact list until he finds Jairo’s name, highlights it, and presses call. He holds his breath through the first two rings, realizes he’s doing it, and makes himself stop. Jairo answers on the fourth ring, sounding a little sleepy.

“Eliot?” he says, and Eliot amends that to both sleepy and pleased.

“Hi. Did I wake you?” he asks.

“Yeah, I just,” he yawns unselfconsciously. “I meant to just lie down for a minute. I guess I was more tired than I thought. What time is it?”

“A little after eight,” Eliot says. “I didn’t think to ask your work hours when we talked about going out dancing.”

“They’re flexible,” Jairo says, sounding more alert now, and also more pleased. “Are you calling to ask me to go out dancing?”

“Yeah. I’m between things right now, and I’ve got a day or two to kill. I know it’s short notice…”

Jairo snorts. “I’ve been waiting for you to call since the second we left the club the last time,” he says easily. “You want to go to the place I know on Grand? I’m pretty sure it’s got live music, even though it’s a Wednesday.”

“Even if it isn’t live, I’m sure it will be fine,” Eliot says. “Where is at on Grand?”

Jairo gives him an address, which Eliot scribbles on printouts about vampires.

“I can find it. What time is good? Do you need some time to wake up?” Eliot asks.

“No, but I’ll want to shower and change and grab a bite to eat. Say 9:30?” Jairo asks.

“Sounds good. I’ll meet you out front,” Eliot says.

“Excellent,” Jairo says enthusiastically. “See you then.”

Eliot lets the call drop, and then goes to take his own shower. He makes Parker take a break to come in and tell him what to wear, and ends up in ragged jeans and a seriously distressed tank top, boots and belt. He pulls his hair back, and she looks him over with a gratifyingly approving look.

“You look like a hard ass,” she says. “It’ll be a perfect contrast with how pretty Jairo is.”

Eliot, who is mostly only concerned that he’s dressed comfortably enough to dance and sweat, is still pleased to hear it.

She brings him a wildly unlikely four condoms and a slim tube of lube, but he tucks them into his pocket obediently and without comment, and doesn’t hesitate at all when she beckons him into the bathroom and expertly lines his eyes. Then she smudges it just a little with her pinky finger, and smiles with a hungry little light in her eyes.

“He’s going to drool,” she says, and strokes a hand across the nearly sheer tank top. “Have a good time.”

She stands on her tip toes and gives him a brief peck on the lips, then physically turns him by the shoulders and propels him gently out of the bathroom.

Eliot feels like he’s moving forward on automatic. He hesitates between the hall and the main living area, and Alec looks up and gives him a good natured wolf-whistle. “It’s almost a shame we didn’t pierce your nipples, too,” he says. “You’d be able to tell right through that shirt.”

Eliot feels a blush coming on, and ducks his head a little to hide it.

Alec blinks a little, and says, “Hey, if you don’t want to do this, don’t let us pressure you into it.”

“I do,” Eliot says. And then a little more firmly. “I do want to. It just all feels a little weird. I’ve never…” he lets the sentence die, unsure of how he wants to end it. _Gone out to score while my lovers stayed at home?_ _Cheated?_ _Slept with a vampire?_

“You should, though,” Parker says. “I bet it will be good. And we don’t mind, Eliot. You’re not doing anything behind our backs. We’re fully aware of what you’re getting up to tonight.” She grins a little wickedly. “Have your fun with him. Don’t forget to memorize the good parts.”

Eliot nods a little dumbly, and Parker presses the keys of his own car into his hand. They feel a little weird in his palm, he’s so used to driving the van.

He wants to ask again if this is okay, but he can _feel_ that it is. It’s like having both of them in his head, urging him on.

“I’ll be back before dawn, I’m guessing,” is what he says finally, and bends to press a quick kiss to Alec’s cheekbone.

“It’s too bad you can’t film it,” Parker says, at least half seriously.

“I’m not going to film it,” Eliot says exasperatedly, and then he is making his way out the door and to his car, a midnight blue Mustang that he’s been driving to the grocery store more than anywhere a midnight blue Mustang might be appreciated lately. He considers the car for a long moment, and then, a little disgusted with his own indecisiveness, unlocks it and climbs in behind the wheel. The motor purrs to life, low and deep with untapped power. The clock on the dash tells him he’s going to be a little early even if he takes his time getting there, but he swings the car around in the parking area anyway and gets it pointed up the ramp.

He realizes as he’s pulling out into the parking garage structure that he doesn’t have a single weapon on him, not even a boot knife, and briefly considers going back for something. Then he dismisses it. He has no fear of Jairo at all; whether that’s wise or not, it’s true.

The marks don’t even cross his mind.


	43. Chapter 43

He is early, by nearly half an hour, but it takes him ten minutes to find a place to park within walking distance, and when he finds the place, Jairo is already out front. He’s wearing jeans almost as disreputable as Eliot’s, but a washed out black instead of plain blue, and a red and silver skin tight sleeveless shirt that isn’t as sheer as what Eliot is wearing, but clings so closely to his body that it might as well be. He grins when he sees Eliot walking up the street, which does indeed have live music spilling out of the open door. It’s smaller than _Hot Mess_ , and the mix is a little different, still both men and women, but more men than women. The band is cranking out a Salsa that is wild enough that Eliot already feels his feet wanting to fall into the steps. When he’s close enough, Jairo leans into him and kisses him without any kind of prelude. His lips are warm, the rest of him warm, too, when Eliot brings up his hands to pull him in. He senses vampire, but he senses sated vampire, which, along with the warmth of his body, probably means that Jairo has already fed tonight.

“You look good,” Jairo tells him, with his lips brushing up against Eliot’s a little as he speaks.

“You look gorgeous,” Eliot says. “You’re slumming it with me.”

Jairo laughs, head tipped back and full of… of life, and says, “I knew you were one of those guys that doesn’t know how good looking you really are.” He pulls Eliot into another, briefer kiss. “Beer or dance?”

“Dealer’s choice,” Eliot says, and Jairo pulls him in through the open door and directly onto the dance floor. The Salsa is still in full swing, and Eliot’s body picks it up with easy muscle memory, though dancing it with a guy is subtly different than dancing it with a girl. He watches Jairo and the people around him for cues, and adjusts to it without much effort. The Salsa segues into a Merengue, which the whole crowd seems to want to be on the floor for, and it’s a little crowded, but still fun.

When another Salsa starts up, this one with a slightly different rhythm, Jairo captures his hand and drags him off the dance floor and to the bar. He doesn’t even try to talk to the bartender over the music, just gestures to get his attention and holds up two fingers. The bartender gives him a familiar little wave and nod, and they lean against the crowded bar, pressed up into each other’s space because there’s just no room for it to be any other way.  
The bartender pulls them a pair of draughts and brings them over. Eliot sips it experimentally, and can’t place it as anything he’s ever had before. He arches a questioning eyebrow at Jairo, who merely mouths “Later,” and they drink their beers in an island of relative calm, though with the music still blaring and the club still as crowded as it is, it’s only relative compared to what it’s like being on the dance floor.

Someone palms Eliot’s ass on the way past him, and without any thought at all, Eliot captures the offending hand and jabs his fingers into the back of it, twisting his wrist at the same time. The ass-grabber, a kid that looks like he might be just barely old enough to be in college, goes straight down to his knees, his face twisted in pain, and either says or just mouths, “Sorry, sorry!” Eliot can’t hear over the music. Eliot gives him a forbidding look, but lets go of the kid’s hand, and the kid scrambles to his feet and makes a hasty retreat. When he looks back at Jairo, he has a smirky little grin on his face with just a touch of possessiveness in it.

Eliot has the feeling he might have overreacted, but Jairo leans in and murmurs, “Hot,” right into the cup of Eliot’s ear, which sends a jolt of pleasure arcing down Eliot’s spine. They finish their beers, and return to the dance floor for the last two-thirds of a Mambo, and then a Rumba which Eliot has to dig up from the dregs of his memory, because it’s just been a while since he’s done that particular dance. He holds his own, though, and they make it through a spirited and entirely sexy Bachata, before making their way back to the bar, where Jairo does the same shuck and jive to get the bartender’s attention.

The bartender lingers this time, leaning over the bar to shout, “Who’s your friend? For a white boy, he can seriously move.”

Jairo mimes swatting at the bartender, who goes back to what he’s doing with a grin and without getting an answer to his question.

“Sorry,” Jairo half-shouts, though Eliot isn’t entirely sure what he’s sorry about. “They know me here,” he shouts, gesturing and then shrugging, like that explains it.

They breeze their way through a Samba, and then another Salsa, and this time when the dance finishes and Jairo grabs his hand, he drags him out of the bar and into the street, where it’s somewhat quieter.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jairo says with a wry little grin. “I could do this all night. But if you wanted to take me home for some less structured dancing, I would be okay with that, too.”

Eliot, who has been at least half hard since the Bachata, says, “Where is home. I’d take you to my place, but then we’d have to live with my girlfriend and boyfriend listening in and possibly making comments during all the good parts.” He’s not kidding either. Parker and Alec would totally do that. Besides which, the Bunker is not a place he can really take anyone without compromising its security.

“I live in the condos on Broadmoor,” Jairo says, then makes a face. “But I have a roommate, and I’m not sure he’d be much better. He might be out, but I can’t guarantee it.”

Eliot has no intention of setting foot in the Broadmoor, so he’s a little relieved to hear that Jairo isn’t that keen on heading to his actual home.

“If it doesn’t strike you as tawdry, there’s no reason why we couldn’t just get a hotel room,” Eliot says. “I can afford something with walls thick enough that our neighbors aren’t likely to hear anything we get up to.”

The tops of Jairo’s cheeks pinken, but he grins. “That works for me if it works for you.”

“Did you drive?” Eliot asks.

“No, I caught a ride,” Jairo says. “You?”

“My car is here,” Eliot says. “Parked a couple of blocks down, because there wasn’t anything close, but near-ish, anyway.”

“Lead the way,” Jairo says, still flushing, and Eliot turns in the direction of his car, Jairo falling into step with him, fumbling for a second, and then taking his hand.

Eliot lets his fingers twine with Jairo’s and pretends he doesn’t notice when Jairo relaxes when his hand-holding is reciprocated.

Eliot ponders hotels on the way to the car; he can afford anything he wants, and he really doesn’t want this to feel tawdry, so he decides on the Modera. It’s probably more expensive than he really needs to bother with, but to hell with it. It’s not like this is something he does all the time, and Jairo will love it.

“This is your car?” Jairo asks, when Eliot stops next to the Mustang and digs his keys out of his pocket. “I thought you had a van.”

“The van is Alec’s,” Eliot says wryly. “It just seats three more comfortably, so that’s what we usually drive.”

“Nice,” Jairo says, and runs his fingers along the glossy finish of the fender. “I would have pegged you for one of the older models, if we were talking Mustangs, though.”

Eliot shrugs and unlocks the doors with the fob. “I needed a car, so I went out and bought one I liked,” he says. “I don’t have the time or energy to restore and maintain anything vintage.”

They climb in, and Eliot starts the engine as Jairo buckles his seatbelt. As Eliot is buckling his, Jairo turns on the radio and fiddles with the dial until he finds something he likes, which turns out to be a classic rock station, which makes Eliot grin a little. Jairo was probably a toddler when most of these songs came out. And Eliot was already in the Army. Ai Caramba.

Jairo taps his fingertips on his knee along to the music as they drive, and on a Wednesday night close to midnight, traffic is light. When Eliot pulls into the parking lot of the Hotel Modera, Jairo turns and gives him a wide-eyed look.

“You know, I’d be just as happy at a Holiday Inn,” he says.

Eliot grins a little. “But our neighbors would probably call and complain,” he says. “This is better. If you’re worried about the money, don’t be. I make good money.”

“Beating people up,” Jairo says, voice deadpan, but lips quirked into a tiny smile.

“Security work,” Eliot corrects, with a little grin. “Besides, we’re already here.” He turns the motor off and opens his door. Jairo stares out the window at the hotel for several more long seconds, then sighs and unbuckles his seatbelt.

“You’ll spoil me, and the next I guy I seriously date won’t be able to understand why I’m not content with someone who can’t Mambo and treat me to fancy hotels,” Jairo says, his voice dire.

Eliot grins. “Then don’t date guys that can’t Mambo and treat you to fancy hotels,” he says. “Maybe consider getting a sugar daddy.”

Jario lets out a little squawk of outrage and slaps Eliot on the shoulder. “Finding a sugar daddy that can Mambo is practically impossible,” he says in a haughty tone, but then can’t quite keep a straight face.

“You could teach him,” Eliot suggests. “Take out an ad. ‘Looking for handsome older man, spendy, must be willing to learn to dance.’”

“Yeah, I’m sure that will work,” Jairo says wryly.

“If you included a picture, I’d bet you’d get at least a few bites,” Eliot says, and Jairo flushes and slaps at Eliot again. “You’ve got to stop hitting me,” Eliot says, grinning. “It’s like taking work home with me.”

Jairo snorts, and then they are entering the ultra modern lobby of the Hotel Modera, and Jairo becomes preoccupied with taking the place in. Eliot is tempted to go for one of their luxury suites, but manages to reign in his impulses, and just gets a regular suite, though he does ask for a room with either an interior bedroom or blackout drapes. Jairo stands beside and slightly behind him, chewing on his lower lip, and Eliot slides an arm around his waist and tugs him forward a little, so that they’re standing obviously together. Jairo flushes at this, but the sleekly dressed young woman working the desk seems to think that they’re cute, and she grins at them the whole time she is checking them in.

Eliot accepts a pair of key cards and passes one casually over to Jairo, who doesn’t seem to know what to do with it for a few seconds, and then shoves it into his back pocket. He gives Eliot a nervous smile, and once they are in the elevator headed to their floor, Eliot says, “Hey, look. You don’t have to do anything here. We can raid the mini-bar and order in room service.”

“What?” Jairo says, as though genuinely bewildered. “No. I mean, I’m feeling a little underdressed for this place, I’ve never stayed anywhere so nice, but I’m not getting cold feet or anything.”

Eliot grins. “Okay, good. But you should still know that you don’t owe me anything. You’re not obliged to put out because I took us to a fancy hotel. I’m doing that at least a little bit for my own ego. We can watch T.V. and order pizza for all I care.”

“If that’s all we do, I’m going to be seriously disappointed,” Jairo says a little dryly. “I bet a place like this has really great beds.”

“They’ve got a jacuzzi and everything,” Eliot says, still grinning a little. “I just don’t want you feeling trapped into anything.”

“Not in the slightest,” Jairo says seriously. “You’re probably the most low pressure guy I’ve been out with in years. If you weren’t already also seriously taken, I’d consider making a more serious play for you.”

Eliot tries to pretend that doesn’t cause his cheeks to heat up, but Jairo’s smile probably means that he’d noticed. He tucks his hand into Eliot’s less tentatively than he had on the street. “Let’s just go do whatever seems like it will be fun,” he says.

“Whatever works for you,” Eliot says, and then leads him out of the elevator and down the hall toward the right suite.

“Holy shit,” Jairo says, when Eliot uses his keycard to unlock the door and opens it, revealing the main room of the suite. “You didn’t have to get a suite!”

“I actually did,” Eliot says. “This hotel only has three types of rooms. Suites, Luxury Suites, and Penthouse Suites. I only got us the regular kind. You already seemed a little overwhelmed.”

“No shit,” Jairo breathes, and walks around the room, which is large, and contains a full sized couch and two comfortable chairs, a coffee table, a 60” HDTV along with a blueray player. There is a small dining table off to one side, and the art on the walls is obviously tastefully expensive.

“Alas, the mini-bar is actually more of a full bar,” Eliot says, when he investigates a little further into the room. “Well, not _full_ , but it has regular sized bottles.” He opens the cupboard beneath the bar, and discovers it’s actually a refrigerator compartment, complete with three different kinds of beer and four different bottles of wine. “No craft beers, but they have Dos Equis,” Eliot says, taking a bottle for himself, and then grabbing one for Jairo when he nods dumbly.

“The really sad part is, we probably won’t even use this room,” Jairo says, doing a full turn to take it all in.

“We can make sure to have sex in every room if it will make you feel better,” Eliot says.

“Wiseass,” Jairo retorts, but he’s grinning.

Eliot twists the caps off of both beers, and crosses the room to hand one to Jairo. “They have wine in the fridge, too, along with some hard liquor, which you should feel free to partake of if you want, but I’m going to stick with beer. I’d prefer to have sober memories of this.”

Jairo grins a little, flushing at the same time. Eliot wonders how that works, for vampires. He doesn’t know a thing about vampire physiology, obviously, but it seems like they’d have better uses for their blood than blushing.

Eliot sets his beer bottle down on top of the cupboard-fridge and crosses the room to Jairo. Jairo watches Eliot for a moment, takes a long drink from his own beer bottle, then puts it down on the coffee table.

He folds right into Eliot when Eliot bends to kiss him, all pliancy and willingness, his mouth still warm, and soft as rose petals. His hands rest on Eliot’s biceps for a few seconds, and then rise up, tugging the hair band carefully out of Eliot’s hair, and then pushing both hands into it as it falls around Eliot’s face. He sighs into Eliot’s mouth, going, if anything, even more pliant, body leaning and bending so that he’s molded to to the front of Eliot’s body.

The want Eliot had been holding in check seems to wash through him, and he’s more brutal than he would have been with either Alec or Parker, bending his taller body so that Jairo’s back is arced in a curve over one arm, using his lips and tongue to open Jairo’s mouth and plunder his way inside. Jairo makes a soft, whining sound that makes Eliot’s cock jerk in his jeans, and Eliot lifts him and backs him into a wall, pushing him against it hard enough that Jairo makes a short, startled noise, but it’s not a sound of protest. Jairo’s mouth is an open invitation, his tongue darting into Eliot’s open mouth for only a moment at a time, mostly just twining around Eliot’s tongue, not trying for dominance or even equality, just taking the kiss like it’s a punishment he’s been looking forward to receiving.

Eliot grinds up against him, his cock jammed against Jairo’s through two layers of denim, and it isn’t enough. He wants to drag down their jeans and have Jairo just like this, against the wall, he wants to pick him up and carry him into the bedroom, where he is sure there will be a large, comfortable bed to do this on, he wants to bend him over the table in the small dining area and press a hand between his shoulder blades and hold him still while Eliot fucks him. He wants all those things at once, and he wants to taste his blood again, fresh grass and clover honey, and he’s a little frustrated that that is the one thing, of all of those things, that he probably won’t be able to do.

He shoves a hand down between them and jerks at the fly of Jairo’s jeans, which come open easily, worn so thoroughly that the buttons slide out of the holes almost without any resistance. Jairo isn’t wearing underwear, and Eliot’s hand finds his cock without any kind of direction from his mind, which is out to lunch just now, and he closes his fist around it and feels it warm and hard, smooth and built must like Jairo is, long and lean. Jairo groans into Eliot’s mouth, and Eliot pulls back just for a second, just long enough to get his own fly unbuttoned and his boxer briefs jerked down around his thighs, and then he has them both in hand, and Jairo is squirming animatedly against him, jerking into his grip at the same time that his hands in Eliot’s hair are pulling, just hard enough to get Eliot to back off for a moment, just to make sure Jairo is okay.

“Shirts,” Jairo pants, cheeks flushed, mouth well-kissed and rosy, and he pushes gently against Eliot’s chest until Eliot pulls back enough so that Jairo can jerk his own shirt off over his head, and then, without pausing to ask, is jerking Eliot’s up and off as well.

Jairo drags his hands from Eliot’s shoulders down to his belly, his eyes hot and his hands greedy.

“Turn around,” Eliot says roughly, and Jairo groans and his eyelashes flutter, and it’s awkward because his jeans are still bunched around his thighs, but he shuffles around to face the wall, one hand shoving at his jeans until they finally spill down around his ankles. Eliot digs in his pocket for lube and condoms, and then shoves his own jeans down, where they are trapped by his boots, and this is going to be fast and inelegant, but it is also going to be hot and messy and wonderful. He manages to fumble the lube open and slide slick fingers between the cheeks of Jairo’s ass, and Jairo gasps out a needful, encouraging sound, and tries to spread his legs wider, and can’t, because of their fucking jeans, but Eliot doesn’t need him spread wider, this will do, and he slides a slick finger into Jairo with just a moment of pressure to warn him, and Jairo’s hips jerk back onto his finger eagerly, his body hardly resisting at all.

Eliot shoves his mouth against the back of Jairo’s neck and muffles a groan there, and then presses in again, twisting his wrist, seeking and finding Jairo’s prostate, and Jairo leans heavily against the wall with his upper body, his hips cocked back, and moans throaty encouragement. Eliot’s whole body clenches in need, and he slides another finger inside, trying to be careful, but Jairo is shoving back against his hand making it impossible, and when he brushes against Jairo’s prostate again, Jairo says, “Okay, now, inside me now, I can take it,” and Eliot has the fleeting thought that he’s going to have to admit to Parker and Hardison that they hadn’t even made it to the bedroom in time, before he is fumbling with a condom, getting it on and then slicking up his cock and easing forward carefully, and he means to go slow and easy, but Jairo braces his hands against the wall and shoves back onto him, fast and hard, one long smooth stroke, and Eliot is buried inside him, slick and tight, his warm body accepting Eliot almost easily. Jairo groans like Eliot is the best thing that ever happened to him, and breathes out hoarsely, all in a rush, “Hard as you want, I want it like that,” almost more of a demand than a request.

Eliot drags his cock back and then slams forward, pushing Jairo hard against the wall, so that he’s almost completely pinned between it and Eliot’s body, and all Jairo does is hiss, “Yessssss,” like he hadn’t believed Eliot would do it, and is desperately gratified to be proven wrong.

Eliot loses all sense of pace or rhythm with that first thrust. Then it is just him pounding into Jairo, the noises he makes, are, God, just insanity inducing, they only push Eliot to drive himself harder and faster into the tight clenching heat of Jairo’s body, until Jairo makes a high, almost broken pleading sound, and Eliot manages to get his head enough together to reach around and catch Jairo’s cock, he can feel the place where it had been pressed against the wall, a slick place against the back of his hand, and he imagines Jairo leaking precome while having his cock jammed repeatedly against the unforgiving surface of the wall, and it’s a good thing that Jairo’s cock is already jerking and spilling over Eliot’s tight fist, because the idea of Jairo getting off on being taken like that, battered into a sexual frenzy, sends Eliot over the edge as well, shoving in as hard and as deep as he can as his hips jerk and his hand aches where it’s wedged between Jairo’s cock and wall, and his Jairo’s loud, grateful cries ring in his ears.

Slowly, Eliot’s orgasm-induce swimmy headed feeling ebbs away, and he’s a little appalled at himself, and make that double appalled, because as appalled as he is at how rough he’d been, he’s still almost unbearably aroused at how the whole thing had happened. He eases his body back, so that Jairo isn’t pinned so completely between the wall and his body.

“Jesus,” Eliot says. “Are you alright?”

“Fuck, I am so alright,” Jairo says dreamily, which helps to dispel some of that feeling of being appalled at himself. “Do it again in a bed and I’ll be alright probably for the next year.”

Eliot lets out a startled laugh, and then Jairo is laughing, too, and says, “And we didn’t even get our boots off,” and then they are both laughing hard, Eliot bracing a hand on the wall beside Jairo and letting himself laugh into his thick, dark curls.

“I, fuck, I didn’t mean to… to fucking _maul_ you,” Eliot says finally, his voice still a little unsteady with laughter.

“I’ll have to put it in the ad,” Jairo says, giggling a little. “‘Looking for handsome older man, spendy, must be willing to learn to dance. Proficiency in sexual mauling a requirement.’”

Eliot snorts out another burst of laughter, and carefully this time, pulls his cock free of Jairo, then wraps his arms around him from behind and pulls him away from the wall, holding Jairo against him, slim and lithe, Jairo’s back to Eliot’s front, and they just stand there for a minute or so, hiccuping out occasional bursts of laughter while Eliot tries to catch his breath.

“Okay,” Eliot eventually asks. “You got your feet under you?”

“Yeah,” Jairo says. “No longer in danger of falling over.”

Eliot slowly lets go, waiting just a moment to make sure Jairo really is sure on his feet, and then shuffles backward a couple of steps and goes down to his knees. He helps Jairo out of the tangle of his jeans and boots first, and then turns and sits on his ass on the ridiculously soft carpet to get his own boots and jeans out from around his lower legs.

“We should…” Jairo says, sounding on the verge of laughter again, and gesturing at the wall. “I mean, somebody is going to notice that.”

The wall is smeared and splattered with Jairo’s come, and yeah, someone is definitely going to notice that. “I’ll take care of it,” Eliot says. “I’ve got to get rid of this condom anyway. Why don’t you try out the bed?”

Jairo grins. “If it’s half as good as the wall, I’m in favor of it,” he says.

Eliot makes his way into the bathroom off of the bedroom, turning on lights as he moves through the rooms, and strips off the condom, ties it up, and tosses it into the trash. He gets a washcloth from the neat stack of linens and towels on the shelves in the bathroom and uses it to clean himself up -- he does not miss condoms with Parker and Eliot, and that is the fucking truth -- and then gets a fresh one, gets it damp, and treks back through the bedroom -- where Jairo is taking up as much of the huge bed as possible by doing his impression of a starfish -- and back into the living area, where he does his best to clean the come off the wall. He notices even as he’s doing it that there isn’t as much as there had been, just a few wet streaks, and thinks about trace evidence, and wonders if it just evaporates on contact with the air, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He checks the floor as well, but if any of it had got that far, it had apparently ended up in Jairo’s jeans, which there isn’t anything he can do about.

He thinks he’s operating on almost full brain power by the time he’s done, because he remembers to grab the lube and condoms on the way back into the bedroom.

That is also when he thinks of the link marks.

Because he can’t think what else to do about them, he turns out the bedroom light before he joins Jairo on the bed. The bathroom and living room lights are still on, so they aren’t in total darkness, and he can pretend he likes the ambience of the dim light if Jairo asks.

Jairo doesn’t ask, though. He merely waits for Eliot to climb in on the other side of the huge bed, setting the condoms and lube on the bedside table, and then slings himself across Eliot for a full on cuddle. Eliot, chuckling a little, scoots them into a better position for it, and cuddles back. Maybe he doesn’t talk much during sex, and maybe he’s not normally a very noisy lover, although that assertion has been getting a workout lately, but he’s never worried about cuddling with a lover of either gender after good sex.

He can feel Jairo’s cock, either still hard, or hard again, poking him in the hip. He thinks about warning the kid that he’s not anywhere close to twenty-five anymore, and it’s going to take him some time, but then chooses not to. Jairo doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. He actually seems more interested in burying his face in Eliot’s hair and occasionally nuzzling at his shoulder than anything else. Besides that, he’s already making at least a partial comeback. Another few minutes, and he will probably be okay to go. He wonders if drinking vampire blood is affecting his refractory period. He supposes it’s possible.

Jairo runs one hand down Eliot’s chest, making a low, appreciative murmur, and nuzzles deeper into his hair. Eliot shifts a little, lifting his hair out of the way so that Jairo could get to his throat. He is pretty sure that is where this is going, and has no real objections. He’d known what he was getting himself into when he’d decided to have a sex with a vampire. Jairo slides his tongue along the line of Eliot’s jaw and then down the column of his neck, his teeth, just regular human, not fanged out yet, worrying a little at the muscle there. He tweaks Eliot’s nipples with the hand wandering along the front of Eliot’s body, and they harden into tight little peaks. He doesn’t think about his nipples as being particularly sensitive, but after piercing Alec’s, he’d become a little more aware of them then he had been before. Jairo presses closed lips against Eliot’s neck, gently, light little pecks, and drags his hand down at the same time to wrap around Eliot’s semi-erect cock.

“I’m forty-two,” Eliot says, laughing gently. “You’re going to have to give me a little more time, I’m afraid. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is not as young as it used to be.”

“I can fix that,” Jairo says, sounding sure of himself, and a little sly about it. Eliot’s mind flashes to Parker biting him and sucking him hard again, and he shudders, though he wonders how Jairo thinks that Eliot might not notice that kind of thing.

The answer becomes obvious a few seconds later. Jairo raises himself up on both hands and hovers over Eliot, his eyes on his face, his gaze pulling at Eliot, but lightly. He can fight it off, he can feel that he can, but he lets a little bit of his mind, a little bit of his will, be dragged into Jairo’s gaze. Jairo grins at him a little, then slides down his body.

He doesn’t bother to go slow, just slips a hand around Eliot’s cock, tipping it up to where he can get his mouth on it, and takes it in, a long, practiced movement that Eliot’s hips respond to even though he isn’t fully erect. It’s just automatic, the heat and the suction drawing his hips upward, and when Jairo bites, it’s actually just below the head, rather than on it, as Parker had, and it’s a barely there pain, just like he’d only barely scraped his fangs across Eliot’s cock, before he sucks hard once, then twice, and then starts to move like it’s just a regular blowjob, his fangs not in evidence, and Eliot realizes that it’s partly letting a little bit of Jairo’s mind trick affect him, and a little bit that Jairo is either just more practiced at this trick that Parker, or is just a gentler soul. With a little smile, Eliot thinks it’s possible that it may be some of both. Either way, he doesn’t come up quite so quickly or so violently as he had with Parker, but it still does the job, and like before, it feels like all the blood in the rest of his body is trying to make it’s way into his cock.

“Okay,” Eliot says, half a sigh of pleasure. “The flesh is a little more quickly prepared than I expected.”

Jairo pulls back to laugh, a sound that is both wicked and light, filled with joy and humor and a kind of enthusiasm for being alive that Eliot can’t help but think has to be a good thing, considering that Jairo isn’t technically alive at all. Eliot pushes that thought away, unwilling to dwell on how he feels about Jairo’s new ‘life’ right now. It’s easy to do, because Jairo slides up Eliot’s body, dragging his skin all along Eliot’s skin as his does it, until their cocks are pressed together again, a little slick from Jairo’s spit along Eliot’s shaft. Jairo shifts his hips and presses down and lets out another sound that is half a moan and half a laugh, then leans down to kiss Eliot, slowly and exploratorily, his teeth and tongue wicked and talented, and this is clearly a Skill with a capital S. Either Jairo has spent a lot of time kissing people, or at some point, someone had taught him all the little tricks, the faint press of teeth, the slick glide of tongue, the nip at the lower lip, and Eliot is panting up into the kiss within just a minute.

“I’d like to fuck you again,” Eliot says. “But I’m not absolutely dead set on the idea, if you want to go the other way around.”

“I’m mostly a bottom,” Jairo murmurs, lips brushing against Eliot’s with every syllable. “I occasionally like to top, but yeah, no, really, you should fuck me again.”

“Yeah, okay,” Eliot agrees, definitely not arguing against it, and Jairo kisses Eliot breathless again, then trails his lips down to his neck. Eliot is ready for it, loose enough with lust that he doesn’t even startle when Jairo presses his fangs into his neck, just groans and feels a bright, hot flare pulse out from the bite, a little different from the warm wave of Parker or Alec’s bite, something that actually feels like a kind of sex act all on it’s own. Jairo’s lips are firm pressure against his throat, and Eliot lifts his hand and runs them down Jairo’s back and ass, stroking just to be touching at first, Jairo’s skin like the sleekest silk, vampire skin, flawless in a way that human skin can never be. Jairo actually pulls his mouth away from Eliot’s neck before Eliot is even worried about it going too far, clearly just wanting enough to taste, and maybe to keep his body as warm as a human’s. “I’m going to get so much teasing at home if you just gave me a hickey,” Eliot murmurs, and slides a hand into Jairo’s curls, just to feel the silky, thick texture of them.

“I don’t think so,” Jairo says. “Or just a little one, if there’s a mark at all.”

Jairo pulls back and his eyes are drowningly dark, but glittering at the same time, his need for blood satisfied, his desire for sex still definitively present.

He gives Eliot a sweet, sultry grin. “If you don’t have any kind of strong preference about positions, I’d kind of like to have you like this. Just. On your back, letting me ride you, letting me go as fast or as slow as I want.”

“You definitely get your pick of positions after I mauled you against the living room wall, kid,” Eliot says, smiling back, leaving that little bit of his mind that is open to Jairo radiate a perfect willingness to do it any way that he wants it.

“We may do this again, and we may not,” Jairo says, not sounding worried, just kind of matter of fact. “Just in case we don’t, I want to ride you this time, so I can remember what’s it like to have you all laid out for me.”

“You got it,” Eliot agrees, cock a hard, long length against the warm skin of Jairo’s belly, their cocks barely brushing against each other.

Jairo shifts, all sinuous grace, until he’s straddling Eliot. “Put your hands behind your head.”

Eliot, smiling, and lacing his fingers behind his head, says, “I thought you were a bottom.”

“I just want to let it happen however it feels right, and your hands on me are too distracting,” Jairo says.

“Good to know,” Eliot says, honestly and genuinely a little flattered. He watches Jairo’s lithe body twist and flex as he leans away from the center of the bed so that he can reach the lube and condoms on the bedside table, and yeah, it’s definitely there, tiny signs of his lack of humanity, but they don’t bother Eliot. He isn’t sure if it’s because it’s Jairo, or if it’s because Eliot is really beginning to think of vampires as… not human, but not monsters, either, just like individuals, like people who just happen to be different than human people. He doesn’t let his mind linger on it.

“What’s this,” Jairo asks, fingertips stroking lightly along the link mark on Eliot’s topmost rib, and Eliot forces his body to remain relaxed. There is a very faint tingly, almost a prickle of electricity as Jairo touches the mark, a flare of awareness in Eliot’s mind sensing the vampire above him, but he pushes that away too. “Had it for years,” Eliot says. “I’m pretty sure I meant it to mean something about me having layers, but I was in the army at the time, and I honestly don’t remember getting it well enough to remember what I was thinking of when I got it.”

Jairo laughs a little, and twists to show Eliot the mark on the back of his shoulder, a maroon and gold twist that isn’t quite an infinity symbol, but looks more like that than anything else. His link mark. 

“New?” Eliot asks, keeping his voice light, interested, unworried, and it isn’t even that hard because he isn’t worried. Jairo is simply in no way someone that Eliot is afraid of.

“I got it when I met my new friends and started getting my life together. So I know what you mean when you say it’s supposed to have some kind of meaning, but not remembering exactly what that meaning is supposed to be.” There is a faint whiff of deceit in the air, but it’s peculiarly honest deceit, as though Jairo knows what it means while at the same time not really knowing what it means at all. Well, he’s still new, just a baby. He may not know all of what the mark can do for him and for his maker at this point. Eliot consciously decides to let it go. Jairo clearly hadn’t recognized Eliot’s link mark for what it was, and that’s the important thing.

He settles back with his hands behind his head, and says, “Were you going to ride me, or am I going to have to throw you down and maul you again.”

Jairo shivers, lips curling into a little smile. “As if either of them would be a bad thing,” he says, eyes sparkling.

Jairo flips the tube of lube open, and Eliot watches as Jairo drizzles a little of the lube along Eliot’s cock, expertly rips the condom packet open, and then slides it onto Eliot’s shaft with the same kind of easy familiarity. He lubes the outside of the condom as well, his hand warm and solid around Eliot’s cock, though he doesn’t use anywhere close to as much lube as Eliot would have. Eliot doesn’t object. He’s pretty sure that Jairo knows what he’s doing, and if what had happened in the hall hadn’t been too much for him, then he’s probably okay with the burn that little lube is going to cause..

Jairo closes the lube and just drops the tube off the side of the bed, and then knee walks up until he’s got his knees on either side of Eliot’s waist. Eliot’s hands actually twitch a little in his hair with the desire to reach for all that perfect golden skin. Jairo lifts Eliot’s cock with two fingers just behind the head, and lowers himself down until Eliot can feel the tip pressed against the muscle of Jairo’s asshole. Jairo hitches out a little breath, and his face, when Eliot thinks to look away from his own cock, and from Jairo’s jutting out sweetly from between his thighs, is relaxed and anticipatory. He lowers himself slowly onto Eliot, so slowly that it’s a little bit like torture actually, and Eliot has to tangle his fingers into his own hair to remind himself to keep his hands to himself, and even then, he can’t stop himself from trying to rise up, just his hips arching up off the bed. Jairo smiles faintly, and doesn’t speed up, enclosing Eliot’s cock in the tight heat of his body a fraction of an inch at a time. Jairo is not even all the way down when Eliot let’s out a little groaning sound of frustrated lust that had been roosting in his throat for a while before it had escaped. Jairo just laughs, and says, “Just let me, I promise not to be mean, I just like the way it feels to be slowly pushed open, I just like…”

“You can have it however you want it,” Eliot says hoarsely. “I’ll do my best to be good, but I’m only human, and if you’re going to go this slow the whole time, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself from flipping you when it gets to be too much.”

“Not the whole time,” Jairo soothes, almost croons. “Just when you first slide in, just when your cock is stretching me out, I just like that part of it to be… It’s more torture for me than for you, I just get off on it being like that, on the burn and the… the, the way it feels like I’m being invaded, I just…”

And then Jairo settles all the way down, his ass resting against Eliot’s groin, and Eliot breathes harshly through parted lips, wanting more, but wanting Jairo to get what he wants from this part more, enough, anyway, to be patient for now.

Then Jairo starts to move, first just a rocking twist of his hips that makes Eliot want to grab him and shove him onto his cock, but he recognizes it as Jairo finding the right angle for himself, and he he might imagine just taking over and fucking the kid stupid, but in reality, he isn’t that kind of a bastard. Jairo gives a short, hoarse shout, leaning a little forward, his hands braced on Eliot’s chest, apparently finding the angle, and then eases off of Eliot’s cock, slow, but not slow like before, not torture. Still, it is enough to make Eliot grit his teeth with want and pleasure, need twisting up in the pit of his belly and tangling along the base of his spine. Then Jairo slides back down, quicker, the friction agonizing and amazing, and groans as his thighs flex and he pulls himself up again, Eliot’s cock sliding along his prostate. Jairo’s fingertips are pressed hard into the flesh of Eliot’s chest, not hurting, but tense with pleasure, and the next time he doesn’t just slide down the shaft of Eliot’s cock, he just loosens the big muscles of his thighs and falls onto it. Eliot shouts in surprised pleasure, and Jairo shudders and clenches around him like a fist, and then it is like that, Jairo being almost as brutal to himself as Eliot had been with him in the living room, dragging himself up the shaft of Eliot’s cock and then just dropping himself back onto the full length of it, moaning low and deep in his throat the whole time, his fingertips jabbing into the muscle of Eliot’s chest as he struggles to maintain the position that is clearly working for him. Eliot’s hands twitch and want to pull loose from behind his head, get a grip on Jairo’s hips and get his feet flat on the bed and slam up into him that way. He doesn’t even know if that would be better, what Jairo is doing already feels so fucking good that Eliot’s hips are jerking up and his balls are tight, it’s just his body’s need to be doing something with the amount of pleasure signals it’s receiving.

Eliot tries closing his eyes, thinking maybe that if he can’t _see_ Jairo riding him -- his face twisted into desperation and pleasure, his cock bobbing and leaking between his thighs, Eliot’s own cock appearing and then disappearing again into Jairo’s body -- that it won’t be so overwhelming, but it only makes it harder not to grab Jairo and roll him over, and he opens his eyes and lets himself watch, keeping hold of himself and his rapidly approaching orgasm as well as he can, feeling the twist and clench of Jairo’s ass around his cock, watching his face as he strains for his own pleasure, trying to let Jairo take what he wants from this without interference from Eliot, as much as his body wants to take over. Then Jairo stiffens, clamping down around Eliot’s cock like a vice, and Eliot actually shouts in pleasure and need that is almost painful, and watches a little stunned as Jairo grinds himself down onto Eliot, his cock jerking in the air, come arcing out to spatter Eliot’s belly.

“Eliot,” Jairo urges, voice high and sharp, and it takes a second for Eliot to realize that Jairo isn’t just saying his name in the heat of the moment, but is urging him, still moving, still riding him in jerky little movements, but they are enough, almost anything would have been enough, and Eliot stops holding back and comes almost at once, so hard that his balls ache a little at the furious way that they spend themselves, and Eliot can’t even grate out a sound through the pleasure, just a long, helpless rushing breath of relief that stutters out of his throat in ragged gasps.

Jairo, trembling, folds down across Eliot, going limp and boneless across his chest, his face buried in Eliot’s shoulder, and just lies there, doesn’t object when Eliot pulls his hands out from behind his head and strokes down his trembling back and sides, skin still sleek like silk, but a little slick with sweat now, but even then, it’s not much, and it’s already drying.

Jairo leans up and smears a kiss across the line of Eliot’s jaw while Eliot is still panting and trying to get his breath back, and for the first time realizes that Jairo isn’t doing the same. He breathes sometimes, to talk and to make noises, but he doesn’t _have_ to breathe, and maybe they teach the new vampires the art of breathing for camouflage, but Jairo isn’t doing it right now. He’s just pressing his mouth against Eliot’s jaw, making his way all the way up his jawline to nuzzle behind his ear, and then he does take a breath, inhaling deeply, as though just scenting Eliot, maybe smelling his blood, maybe just the lust pheromones he’s putting out through his all too human pores. He thinks it should matter, but since he’s only noticing it now, after everything else, apparently it doesn’t matter that much.

Jairo sits up slowly, eyes dazed and satiated, and eases off Eliot’s cock before flopping down onto his side on the bed, scooting in close to Eliot, one arm and one leg flung over chest and thighs, brow pressed against Eliot’s shoulder. Eliot keeps his arms around Jairo -- one of them in now pinned under Jairo, so he doesn’t have a lot of choice -- feeling the occasional tremor still shaking his slim body.

They are silent until Eliot is breathing almost normally again.

Then Jairo murmurs, “Christ, that was good,” and kisses Eliot’s shoulder lightly, almost like it’s an afterthought.

“You’re telling me,” Eliot says, amused and feeling far more fond of this little vampire than is probably good for him.

Another few minutes pass in silence, and Jairo asks, “Your… significant others. Are they as good in bed as you are?”

Eliot considers the question. “Depends one what you like, I guess. Alec would never maul you in the living room, but Parker might. She’d definitely want to spread you out and use her strap on until you beg for mercy. Alec would probably be equally likely to ride you into the mattress or let you ride him into the mattress. None of us are… I don’t know. We have lazy sex sometimes, low key sex, but for the most part, we all three have more… intense tendencies.”

Jairo laughs throatily. “Does she fuck you with her strap on?” he wants to know. “She’s so tiny and… I don’t know. You’re like twice her size.”

“She totally fucks me with her strap on,” Eliot says easily. “She’s good at it. I’ve got no complaints at home.”

“I didn’t really think you would,” Jairo says, sounding just a touch envious. “They’re both gorgeous. I… This isn’t meant to come across as needy, but why would you even bother with anyone else?”

“We haven’t ever before,” Eliot says. “But being together and being happy doesn’t mean we’re blind or dead. We don’t stop being attracted to other people just because we’re together. And I like you. And you can dance, and you have a microbrew spreadsheet. I don’t know exactly why. I didn’t go out looking. It just sort of happened organically.”

“I’m not complaining,” Jairo says, pressing another kiss to Eliot’s shoulder. “I’m mostly just curious about how it works.”

“It just works,” Eliot says. “We all like you. You know I’m with them, so I’m not leading you on. Both of them would like to get their greedy hands on you, and I think that helps. That we all three agree that you’re worth our time. If it was someone only one of us liked and the other two didn’t, it might not have worked out. I don’t know. It’s our first time.”

“This isn’t going to cause problems, though?” Jairo asks, sounding like he’s genuinely concerned. “I don’t want to be the guy that causes you problems at home, Eliot.”

“Remember what I said before. Don’t _worry_ about it. They were working on projects and I was basically bored and bothering them, and they suggested this. My instructions are to memorize the good parts so that I can tell them about it later. Parker dressed me for this date. She’s the reason that I had condoms and lube in my pocket. It’s not a traditional kind of relationship, I’ll grant you, but it works for us. And if I were even a little worried, I wouldn’t have done this. I’d have tried to let you down easy, because I’m not a huge dick if I don’t have to be, but if I thought it was going to cause problems, I would have let you down. I’d have felt bad for it, but I will never do anything I think might fuck up what I’ve already got.”

“I feel lucky at the same time I’m kind of envious,” Jairo says, like he feels like he has to admit it. “Not jealous exactly. Just. I’d like to find a person or two I could be that much myself with.”

“You’ve got time,” Eliot says, a little wryly, because Jairo is a vampire and has basically nothing but time at this point. “And it didn’t happen all at once for the three of us. I actually kind of thought Alec and Parker were going to hook up for a while. We’ve known each other for a few years now, and things just sort of worked out into the way they are now. I honestly think we were all a little surprised.”

That is such an understatement that Eliot feels a little guilty about it.

“More than a little, maybe,” he amends. “But it works, and it’s better than I ever expected to get, and I’d do anything to make it keep working. But it turns out, that I don’t have to do much at all to make it work. Just be honest. And, you know, the standard things you deal with in a relationship. Like Alec has this awful addiction to orange soda, so our fridge is always so full of it there’s barely any room for food. And Parker get’s antsy if you try to cuddle her after sex, which doesn’t mean she doesn’t want closeness, just that you have to let her initiate that herself. Just regular stuff.”

“It sounds good,” Jairo says. “Lucky you. And lucky me, obviously, because I’m nowhere even close to a blushing virgin, and this has been some of the best sex I’ve ever had.” He grins, cocking his head back to look at Eliot. “I’m still not sure I want to go to bed with all three of you at once, honestly,” he says. “It seems like it might be like an intrusion. And maybe I’m a little intimidated by Parker, since I’m pretty much gay.”

“You don’t have to do anything with anyone, including with me,” Eliot says. “This is fine if it’s a one shot, though I’ll be disappointed if we don’t at least go out dancing together. But it’s okay if that’s all we do together, too.”

“I would obviously like to have more good sex, but it’s not a requirement,” Jairo says, smirking a little. “I think I actually like you more than I want to fuck you, and that’s important to me. Until the last few months, I didn’t have a lot of people that I just liked to hang out with. It’s better now, but still. I’m always willing to be your dancing date, even if that’s as far as it goes.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Eliot says, smiling.

He isn’t entirely surprised when Jairo glances down at his watch and then rolls a little way away on the big bed. “Man, I don’t want you to feel like we fucked and then I bolted, but it’s a Wednesday night. I have to get home. I’ll have to go into work at some point tomorrow and not look like I didn’t sleep because I spent all night with a hot older spendy guy who can dance and sexually mauled me.”

Eliot snorts. “I’ll drive you home,” he says. He winces as he peels the condom off of his soft cock and gets up to dispose of it. “Maybe a quick shower first?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Jairo agrees, grinning wryly. “There are certain areas of my body that I need to address.”

The shower is big enough for two, and Eliot hunts down and recovers his hair tie so he doesn’t have to worry about getting his hair too wet while they clean up.

They talk about music and dancing on the drive to the Broadmoor, and it’s easy and not at all awkward. Eliot pulls up right out front. He can sense the press of vampires even from the street, but he smiles when Jairo leans in to press a light kiss against his lips. “Call me,” Jairo says, and then vanishes into the building.

Eliot pulls away from the curb, concentrating on driving, rather than on trying to pick out individual vampire minds, and drives a longer and more elaborate route home than he really needs to because the feel of all of those vampire’s in his senses at once raises a little bit of paranoia in him that he can’t quite shake.

Alec and Parker are both in bed when he gets in just before dawn, and neither of them move when he crawls into bed with them.


	44. Chapter 44

He wakes up because Alec brings him breakfast in bed at a little before noon.

“What’s this for?” Eliot asks a little groggily, but sits up against the headboard and allows Alec to place the tray across his lap. He goes for the juice first, to get this throat wet.

“Parker bet me her clit piercing that you wouldn’t get home before we woke up this morning,” Alec says. “Which you were, so I won, and Parker and I are going out to get her clit pierced this afternoon. So you deserve breakfast in bed.”

“I… didn’t realize you were that invested in Parker’s clit being pierced,” Eliot says, feeling a little fuzzy around the edges, like maybe this conversation would make more sense if he’d been awake for an hour or so.

“I don’t know that I was, really, but after you left last night Parker started talking about what a good clit piercing was supposed to do for a woman, and the idea just kept seeming better and better, and then she said she thought Jairo would talk you into staying the day with him, and I said he probably wouldn’t, and that you’d be home before we got out of bed, and then it sort of evolved into a bet, and drink some coffee, because you look like you could use it, man.”

Eliot obediently drinks some coffee.

“Of course, this means you have to let her pierce your cock,” Alec continues cheerfully, and Eliot nearly spits out his mouthful of coffee. “That was the deal, remember?” Alec is looking entirely too pleased with himself.

Dimly, Eliot does recall that that was the deal. It just had seemed like a deal set further into the future than this. He drinks more coffee. It definitely feels like he needs to be more awake for this conversation. Before he agrees to anything else. Like a time frame. He clumsily segues into a different subject.

“How is the project with the condensed history and the website coming?” Eliot asks, and doesn’t let himself think of needles and his cock while his appetite slowly kindles and he begins to work his way through the breakfast on his tray.

“Ninety-five percent done,” Alec says. “A few things to touch up, and then the actual hacking part into the archive, which is the only hard part. Parker is done with the history, but wants you to read it over in case you catch anything she left in there that is better left out. She celebrated finishing with a two hour bath in the jacuzzi with the door open so she could tell me what she was doing with herself while she wondered what you were doing with your vampire ‘sexfriend’ -- her word, not mine -- and basically torturing me while I was trying to finish pushing code on the new website.” Alec sounds amused and long suffering at the same time. Eliot smiles, because he can imagine Parker doing exactly that without ever being really aware that she was torturing Alec at all, though it could have just as easily have been the point to torture Alec. Either she’s oblivious, or she’s devious, and it’s hard to tell which one is driving her at any given moment.

“How long did you last until you joined her?” Eliot asks.

“Two hours,” Alec says, as if it’s obvious. “Otherwise who knows how long she would have kept it up.”

It’s a fair point, and Eliot nods, ceding it to Alec.

“I wouldn’t have lasted that long if it hadn’t been critical code,” Alec admits. “So how _did_ it go with your vampire sexfriend?”

Eliot grins with his mouth full of bacon, and Alec chuckles knowingly. Eliot has to finish chewing quickly. “I’ll wait for Parker to get here before we get into details, because there’s no point in telling it twice, but it was very good. As in, we didn’t even make it into the bedroom the first time, good.”

“Couch?” Alec asks.

“No, just up against the wall,” Eliot says.

“Man, I never get fucked up against the wall,” Alec says cheerfully. “I’m going to add that to the list.”

“You’re too damned tall to get fucked up against the wall, Alec,” Eliot says, not without sympathy. “I’d have to have you spread so wide your balance would be in question, and Parker would actually need a small ladder.”

Alec makes a disgruntled noise, but doesn’t actually argue the issue, so Eliot assumes it isn’t anything he feel like he really has to have. If it was, Eliot would figure out a way to make it work, but really, he’d have to get pretty creative. “You’re not too tall,” Alec says thoughtfully, as though sorting it out in his head even as he’s saying it. “I could totally fuck you up against the wall.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, smirking. “And if you are really desperate to get this out of the bedroom just for the sake of fun and experimentation, I could bend you over almost any piece of furniture we have.”

Alec’s eyes sparkle delightedly. “I expect you to remember you said that,” he says, and runs a hand down Eliot’s bare arm. “I’d like to be bent over a random piece of furniture when I’m not really expecting it.”

“I will definitely keep that in mind,” Eliot says, and means it. “Where is Parker?”

“She went out to meet Sophie for brunch a couple of hours ago,” Alec says. “She should be home soon. I think Sophie wanted someone to girl talk to about her thing with Nate.” He looks very slightly worried. “I hope she gets what she’s looking for. Parker might be better at that kind of thing now that she is, you know, with us, but she’s still Parker, and I’m not sure how ‘girl talk’ really works to begin with. Parker was a little nervous. I told her to try talking to Sophie like she was one of us.” Alec shrugs. “It may means she overshares, but I wasn’t sure what other advice to give her.”

Eliot understands exactly what Alec is trying to say, and nods. “Parker is just Parker. Sophie knows that. For the most part, she accepts it. I think if Sophie is calling Parker for girl talk, it’s probably more about Sophie’s need to talk than about Parker’s ability to give her any kind of useful advice.”

Alec nods. “Yeah, probably. I just, you know. Don’t want Parker to feel like she doesn’t know how to be a good friend. She may not know how to do it in the way most people do, but she’s a good friend.” He sounds a little defensive now.

“I know that,” Eliot says. “So does Sophie. Sophie knows Parker tries. I think that will be enough for her.”

“Man, I hope so. Because if Parker comes home upset, I’m going to feel like I have to call Sophie and bitch at her about it,” Alec admits. “And I don’t want to do that, but…”

Eliot knows exactly how Alec feels. He feels the same way.

It turns out to be moot. Parker slams into the bunker before Eliot has even finished the rest of his breakfast, calling, “Close your eyes, I have secret stuff I bought and I don’t want you seeing it until I use it on you!”

She pauses just outside the bedroom. “Are your eyes closed?”

Eliot and Alec exchange a look and close their eyes. “They’re closed,” Alec calls out. “I hope this is good secret stuff and not frightening secret stuff.”

“Sophie helped me pick it out, so it should all be good,” Parker says, and Eliot hears her open the door to the closet and the rustling of bags and what sounds like cloth. After a couple of minutes, she comes out of the closet and closes the door, and says, “Okay, you can open your eyes.”

Her eyes are bright, and her grin is real and expansive.

“So,” she says. “Sophie and Nate actually are finally having sex! They’ve been taking it slow, Sophie says, because Nate’s, you know, kind of messed up, but he took her out ballroom dancing and then to a fancy restaurant, and then when they were done, asked her if she wanted to stay, and she said yes, and she says he acted like he was terrified and thrilled at the same time, but that he got ahold of himself, and that he was careful and gentle until things got really going, and then was not quite so gentle, which was good with Sophie, and so now they’re actually having sex. She says they had sex four times yesterday. She just stayed at Nate’s apartment all day, and they didn’t do anything but eat and talk and have sex.” Parker beams. “They are for real dating. Nate asked her and everything.”

Eliot can’t bring himself to be quite as excited as Parker at this news, but he also can’t help smiling at her excitement, and he _is_ glad for Nate and Sophie, and he thinks it will be good for both of them to have a real relationship that they’ve actually talked about, rather than dancing around each other.

“Are you sure Sophie will have wanted you to tell us this?” Alec asks, but he’s smiling, too. “I’m not an expert in girl talk, but I think you’re supposed to keep it between the girls.”

“I asked her,” Parker says. “I wasn’t sure, but I told her that I tell you guys pretty much everything because sometimes I need help working out how I feel about things, and she said that it was fine, and just asked me to ask you not to try to talk to Nate about it because Nate is, well, she said, private, and then she said repressed, and then she laughed. I told her things, too. I hope that’s okay. Nothing secret really, but once she started telling me about how happy she was, I kind of realized that I was really happy too, and wanted to tell her about being happy, and I didn’t think about if you guys would want me to tell her anything until it was too late.” She bites her lip uncertainly. “Is it okay?”

“It’s fine,” Eliot says firmly, and lifts the tray off his lap. Alec takes it and sets it on top of the chest of drawers, and Eliot beckons Parker over. She bounces over and settles onto the edge of the bed, leaning into him easily. “I would prefer it if you didn’t tell Sophie specific things, like if I do actually let you pierce my cock, I wouldn’t want Sophie to know that, but for the most part, you can tell Sophie anything you want to that doesn’t out us as Sun Walkers.”

“Yeah, nothing like that,” Parker says, and then looks a little worriedly at Alec. “I did tell her about your nipples,” she says apologetically. “I’m sorry, I just got excited and it kind of spilled out.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Alec says, waving it away with an easy gesture. “I am not worried about who know I have pierced nipples. There is kind of a difference in pierced nipples and having a pierced cock, Parker,” Alec explains. “It’s a lot more intimate to talk about a guy’s cock than it is to talk about his nipples. Besides that, I’m a little more easygoing than Eliot is about stuff like that. Stuff that might bother him probably won’t bother me. We just have different levels of what privacy means to us.”

Parker looks at Eliot. “If there is stuff we do I shouldn’t tell anyone because it would upset you, I think you had better tell me that,” she says seriously. “Because I didn’t think I would, but I had a good time with Sophie today, and it was nice to have someone to talk to about stuff, not that you guys aren’t enough…” She bites her lip again.

“It’s different to have a friend to tell when you’re happy,” Eliot says soothingly. “I know that. It’s okay. And most of what we do, if it doesn’t embarrass Sophie, then it doesn’t embarrass me for Sophie to know about it, if you see what I’m saying. Do you think you’ll be able to tell what is okay to tell Sophie without embarrassing her?”

Parker actually cocks her head to one side, thinking that through. “I think so. I didn’t tell her about tying you guys up or anything. I think that might have been more than she wanted to know. And we didn’t really talk about really intimate sex stuff, like exactly what we did, or anything. It was more general, just about it being good, and about what it’s like to have two guys at once -- she wanted to know if I thought either of you ever felt left out -- but I think the only really private thing I talked about was Alec’s nipple piercings, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but it just kind of came out.”

“Doesn’t bother me,” Alec repeats. “I’ll show them to her, if she wants to see them.” He flicks one of them with a thumb. “Besides, unless I limit myself to extremely loose shirts on the job, sooner or later Sophie and Nate will probably both notice them. It’s kind of their jobs to notice the details.”

“I’ll be sure to keep things fairly general,” Parker says. “And it was like that, mostly, just general, about being happy, and about good sex, and about multiple orgasms, and how we’re lucky to be able to have them and we feel kind of bad that you guys don’t get them. Mostly it was just about being happy, and little things you do that make me happy being with you two. Not even sex things. Just other things.” She actually goes a little pink. “Like just how I feel like I don’t have to be any specific way for you to still love me. That I can just be me, and you both accept that it’s just me, and I don’t feel like you’re comparing me to what a more… normal person would be like.”

“There is nothing wrong with you, Parker,” Eliot says firmly. “You’re unique, you’re special, and we’re lucky to have you. There isn’t any ‘normal’ about it. You’re Parker, and we chose you. Literally. We didn’t just fall into bed, and we didn’t even date like regular people. We knew we were tying ourselves to each other in ways that regular people don’t, and we chose to do that with you, because you’re you, not _in spite_ of it. Okay?”

Parker’s eyes are wide, and for a moment, Eliot thinks she might cry. He doesn’t want to make her cry, but he’ll accept it if she does and try to figure out how to comfort her without smothering her, because he really had known what he was getting into, more or less. Maybe it’s more intense than he had expected, but that’s a benefit, as far as he’s concerned, not a drawback.

Instead of crying, though, she smiles, wide and happy and sweet, and leans in and kisses him soundly, in spite of the fact that he probably still tastes like sausage from breakfast.

“Exactly what he said,” Alec says, and Parker turns to look at him, and he bends down and cups her face. “We chose you, knowing who you are. We are lucky you chose us, too. Don’t forget that. And normal is a word stupid people use to describe other stupid people that are just like them. None of us are normal. It would be boring if we were. That includes Nate and Sophie, Parker. We’re better than normal.” He kisses her, and she kisses him back fiercely.

“Okay,” she says, once Alec has pulled back, and they are all feeling kind of warm and fuzzy in the links. “I won’t tell her really private bedroom stuff, but it was good. It was the first time I felt like we did something together and really had something in common to talk about.” She looks at each of them. “I mean, I tried to do things with her, and some of the things were even sort of fun, but this was different. It’s nothing like the link marks, obviously, but it was still like we kind of synced up and connected in a way that we never managed before. I really liked it.”

“Good,” Eliot says. “Good for both of you. And most of the bedroom stuff, I don’t really care if she knows about. I think it might embarrass her to know, but it doesn’t embarrass me, if it ever accidentally falls out of your mouth. So don’t worry too much about that. But if we actually do pierce my cock, that is not something I am comfortable with Sophie knowing about me. That’s not something I want anyone but the two of you to know about me.”

“What do you mean, if?” Alec says. “I thought this was pretty much a definite thing we were going to do.”

Eliot feels an odd twinge from Alec, a kind of little sliver of disappointment, and realizes that Alec, at least, is fairly invested in having Eliot’s cock pierced.

“Eliot is allowed to change his mind,” Parker says firmly. “If he’s thought it over and doesn’t think it’s something he wants to try, it’s his decision.”

“Yeah, of course it is,” Alec says, and Eliot can feel him shoving down that little bit of disappointment, and also feeling a little guilty for having it at all.

“I haven’t changed my mind,” Eliot says slowly. “I am willing to at least give it a try. I’m not even worried about being pierced, once it’s all done and over with. It’s the process I’m not sure I’ll be okay with. Piercings in my cock are theoretically hot, in my head. Needles in my cock, not so much.”

Parker makes a low, thoughtful sound. “What if we could do it without you having to deal with the part where we pierce you,” she asks.

Eliot feels his brows arch. “Exactly how would you manage that?” he asks, dubious, but willing to listen.

“If you let one of us give you blood and really come into your mind, I think we could… well, I think _I_ could, at least, make it so that you were hardly aware of the piercing happening.” She looks serious, thoughtful. “Like when you questioned the reporter and Jairo. They were there, but not there. I’m pretty sure I could do that to you if you let me. If you fought, you could probably break free of me, but if you were willing.” She shrugs a little.

“I’m not afraid of the pain,” Eliot says, although he is, a little. “It’s more like I’m afraid that, since I don’t actually know how it feels to be pierced like that, I won’t find the pain worth it to get to part where the piercings are good, if that makes sense?”

“Yeah, it makes sense,” Alec says. “I liked it, but you aren’t really wired like me, I think.”

“I know he isn’t,” Parker says, sounding sure. “For Eliot, the piercing part would be something he’d have to get through to get to the part where he’s pierced, and can then enjoy the rewards. It won’t turn him on. We might be able to distract him from some of it, but for him, it’s just going to hurt. But I think I can make it so that you just aren’t really there for that part, if you’re willing to let me that deeply into your mind.”

Eliot thinks about that for a long moment, but it isn’t much of a question. “And the worst possible outcome is that I don’t like the piercings for whatever reason, and we take them out, right?”

“Yep,” Parker says. “But you’ll like them.”

“Then I don’t see why I wouldn’t let you do it that way,” Eliot says. “It makes it so that I don’t have to deal with what I’m pretty sure is just going to be straight pain for me, without whatever kind of endorphin rush Alec gets from it, and it also lets you practice with your mental abilities, which is something I’ve been wanting you to be able to do for a while.” He shrugs a little. “I’m kind of interested in what it would be like to be really taken under that way, anyway, just so I know how powerful it is. And I trust you.” And really, it’s that simple. He trusts Parker, both to overpower his mind and not do anything untoward to him while he’s helpless like that, and also that, once it’s done, he’ll actively like the piercings.

Parker gives him a soft, helpless kind of look, and leans into him, just pressing against him. He can feel her in the link, something like gratitude, but she doesn’t say anything. Just leans into him, like she can press her feelings into him that way, and he kisses the top of her head.

“Did Alec tell you that I’m going to get my clit pierced today because you have more self control than I gave you credit for,” she asks, and sits back up, smiling a little. “I really thought you’d convince him to spend the day with you.”

“I probably could have, but I didn’t try. This thing with him has to be something we both feel easy about, and pressing him to stay might have made him nervous. I don’t want him to feel nervous about me.” Eliot shrugs. “I like him too much to want to jeopardize it over what is really just sex.”

“But it was good sex?” she asks, arching both brows.

“Other than the two of you, it was some of the best sex of my life,” Eliot admits.

“Tell us everything,” Parker says, grinning, and Alec comes and sits on the foot of the bed tailor fashion, apparently also wanting the whole story.

Eliot tells it, leaving nothing out, including the parts where they had just talked. He can feel both of them prickling with arousal throughout the telling, and he’s hard by the time he’s done.

“I wonder if catching you with my eyes before I bit your cock would make it like it was with him,” Parker says thoughtfully, and then grins a little wickedly. “I mean, I wonder, but I’m not sure I actually want it to be that easy for you. You were… you felt…” She doesn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence, but Eliot understands what she means.

When Jairo had done it, it had felt only a little like he was being pulled back to full arousal, ready or not. When Parker had done it, it had been like being an idling car, and that someone had suddenly and forcefully stomped on the gas.

“I don’t have a problem with the way you did it,” he tells her, and feels her feeling happy to hear it. “Jairo was trying to hide what he was doing. It didn’t feel the same, though they both worked, but the way you did it was like being dragged back to the point where I was so ready it was all I could do not to just shove you down and shove it in. It was a lot more intense.”

“I know I said I didn’t think I could let anyone bite my cock,” Alec says, “but now I’m getting curious.”

“You’ll like it,” Parker says, sounding both certain and smug. “You already like a little pain, and the rush will be good for you.”

“What about you?” Eliot wonders. “With the clit piercing, I mean. I know you’re okay with a little pain with your sex, but this won’t actually be during sex, if you’re going to go out and have someone experienced do it.”

“It will hurt,” Parker says, and shrugs. “But I’ll take one or both of you with me, and we’ll blood heal it as soon as we get the chance.”

“Do you know a parlor that does genital piercing?” Alec asks.

“No, not a parlor,” Parker says. “A person. I’ve already called her, and set up the appointment. She’s an expert at doing it right, and I trust her not to mess it up.” She pauses for a long moment. “I slept with her a few times. I wouldn’t say that we were girlfriends, but occasionally we were lovers. I told her I’m with someone else now, and she won’t hit on me or anything. Is that okay? Should I have not have mentioned that part?”

“No, that part is fine,” Eliot says. “I’m glad it’s someone you know and trust. I don’t see how it can be anything but helpful that she’s already familiar with your body.”

“And your girly bits,” Alec adds, grinning. Parker rolls her eyes.

“Anyway, she’s willing to pierce me anywhere I want today, so if the two of you are still debating on nipple rings….”

“I’d say pass for now,” Eliot says. “One piercing at a time. And besides.” He shifts a little uncomfortably. “You said you’d never done any needle play, and that we could start there with your nipples and you could see what you thought.”

Parker turns and gives him a long look. “Eliot, are you interested in play piercing me? For you, I mean. Because the idea gets _you_ hot, not because it might work for me?”

Eliot’s face heats, but he admits, “Yeah, I guess. I mean. I want to do it to Alec because he clearly got off on it, but I want to do it to you, too. If you want that. I’ve never done it before, so I’d need some guidance, but.”

“But the idea of doing it gets you hot?” It’s a question, but there is a little trilling note to her voice that means she already knows the answer.

“Yeah. Theoretically, anyway,” Eliot says.

“Maybe a little bit of a sadist after all,” Parker says, still with that little trill in her voice that almost sounds like approval or anticipation.

“Why is that a surprise?” he asks, and then wonders a little about it himself, because he’s never felt much of an urge to hurt his bed partners before. But. But with his inhuman strength and his desire to drink blood, he had never really let himself think about it. He hadn’t been in denial, he doesn’t think. It really had never come up. But with these two, things are different.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “But mostly because my experience with people who do violent things in their daily lives is kind of limited. But from what I know, people who fight for a living tend to want to keep hurting people separate from what they do in bed.”

“It’s not the same kind of hurting people,” Eliot says, feeling pretty certain about it.

“No, it’s not,” she agrees. “But it’s still true most of the time.” She looks at him again for another long moment. “I should have figured it out,” she says finally. “That first time, when you didn’t even hesitate to bite me when I asked for it.” She sighs a little. “I’d totally say we should all three get naked and see what happens, except that I’m getting my clit pierced in a couple of hours, and I can’t be all swollen and sex high while she does it. She has to be able to depend on me being able to tell her if something doesn’t feel right.”

Which makes sense, but doesn’t do anything to mitigate Eliot’s erection.

Alec sighs a little, and mutters, “Damn,” but doesn’t argue about it.

Eliot comforts himself that after Parker gets her clit pierced and they blood heal her, there will probably be all kinds of sex.

Alec stands up. “I’m ready for the part where I actually hack the archive and risk tearing it down due to its security measures. I’m reminding you that that could actually happen. It’s designed to happen that way if it’s hacked, actually, but I think I can do it without tripping any of the triggers. My point being, if we’re not having sex now, I can start doing that, but once I start, I can’t stop. So if you need me with you when you go get your clit pierced, I won’t start now, since I don’t know how long it will actually take.” He shifts a little, his erection obvious. “It’s just the best way I know of distracting myself from having to delay any sexual gratification type things,” he says, almost a little apologetically.

Parker looks at Eliot. “Are you okay with going with me?” she asks.

“Of course,” Eliot says, not sure why it’s even a question.

“Then it should be fine, Alec,” she says. “As long as one of you is there for the blood healing. I just thought you might like to watch.”

“Oh, I would,” Alec says. “But this needs to get done, too, and I think that after you get your girly bits pierced, there will actually be some sex, and I’m not sure how long we’ll be doing that. I’m trying to be responsible, and get this moving first. Once I do the hacking and set up the program, the website will be live, and we won’t need to do anything on it other than occasionally check on it and answer questions people post and that kind of stuff, which doesn’t have to be handled right away. This whole part is going to take some time while people shuffle between the websites, and the sooner we get that over with, the better. I mean, it’s going to take time anyway, but until I actually do my part of the hacking, nothing is moving forward. So.”

“I still wanted Eliot to go over the history file,” Parker says. “There should be time for him to do that before it’s time to go to my appointment.”

“I can do that,” Eliot says, only a little grudgingly. Parker looks amused.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m going to take a bath, because if you’re going to get your genitals pierced, it’s only polite to have them squeaky clean for your piercer, and listening to Eliot talk about his vampire sex has made me less than completely clean.” She grins.

“You didn’t have to say that,” Alec says. “That’s just cruel, Parker.”

She smiles and shrugs. “I can’t help what makes me wet,” she says, and Alec glares at her, while she smiles innocently back at him.

Alec huffs and leaves the room, adjusting himself in his jeans without making any attempt to hide what he’s doing. Parker gives Eliot a little grin, and then takes herself off to the bathroom. Eliot hears the water in the jacuzzi start, and has to force himself to get out of the bed and go take a shower in the hall bath, because his hard on will never go away if he’s in the big shower, where he can watch Parker cleaning herself up for her appointment. He’s tempted to jerk off anyway, just because he can, but in the end, decides to wait for what happens after the piercing. If Alec can get some real work done with the wood he’s sporting, the least Eliot can do is read over the vampire history file.

He’s most of the way through it, and wishing there was some way to spin the way the vampires had turned on the Sun Walkers so it isn’t quite so plain that the Sun Walkers got royally shafted, when Parker comes out of the bedroom in the peasant skirt and blouse that he remembers her briefly wearing during their aborted vacation months ago. He remembers not liking her not looking like herself, but he doesn’t have the same reaction now. Now he’s seen her in everything and nothing, and doesn’t have any set notions as to how she should dress to look like Parker. Now he just sees that the color of the top makes her eyes look bright, and the whole thing makes her look both relaxed and classy at once. It occurs to him that he doesn’t think he’s ever once told her that she’s beautiful. He has thought it, and he’s pretty sure she knows he thinks so, but he doesn’t want to be the kind of guy that never says it, even if it is something he never thinks about saying. He should maybe work on changing the fact that he doesn’t think to tell his partners that they are both gorgeous.

“You look gorgeous,” he says, and it sounds a little weird, saying it out loud, but he means it, and Parker’s smile is well worth the slight weirdness. Alec pauses what he’s doing and looks around, but Alec is always telling them that they are beautiful. Still, when he echoes Eliot’s sentiments, Parker’s smile blooms wider.

She comes to settle next to Eliot, glancing at the laptop he’s reading off of to get an idea of where he is in the text.

“I didn’t modernize all the language because I thought it was important that the Daywalkers reading it get a sense of the age of the text, but I did structure things a little differently, just so it wasn’t so hard to get through,” she says. “And some of the language I did modernize, again, because we want them to read this, and if they can’t make sense of the language, they’re going to just skip it.” She looks a question at it.

“I think you managed a good balance,” Eliot says truthfully. “Did you take writing classes in college?”

“No,” she says, smiling. “I’ve read a couple of books on creative writing, because I was interested in the process, but I’ve never really written anything myself. I didn’t really write this. I just tweaked it.”

“Well, it reads well to me,” Eliot says. “I understand what you mean about not modernizing all of the language. Having not actually read the original myself, I still get a sense that a lot of this was written a long time ago, but I didn’t ever feel like I had to puzzle my way through any of it. So, yeah, I think you did an excellent job. I was mostly just sitting here wishing that I could think of a way not to make it so obvious that the vampires screwed the Sun Walkers over.”

“There was no way to make that part any less bad than it really was,” Parker says. “I tried to think of ways to do it, and if you want an inaccurate summary of the history put up, I can rewrite it and lie a little, so it isn’t so obvious that both sides of the conflict threw the Sun Walkers under the bus, but in the end, I decided to let it speak for itself. I’ll do it if you want me to, but I… I _feel_ like every Daywalker should get to make his or her own decision on whether or not what really happened is so bad that there is no possibility of building up any kind of relationship with the vampires.” Eliot knows how hard it is for her to make ‘I feel’ statements, so he doesn’t interrupt, just focuses his attention on her and listens. “I think that it’s one of the first things that will come up in posts, when the Daywalkers read the histories, and I think we’ll have the opportunity to let them know what we think. Or. I know what I think. I’m not sure I know what you think.” She looks expectantly at him.

“I think they were scared and angry, and looking for someone to blame, and without starting a vampire war, which both sides would have had to have known would have been long and bitter and a bloodbath, and ultimately pointless, because Samael was dead, they pinned the blame on the Sun Walkers. The ones that thought Samael should have been allowed to rule at least had a real reason to hunt and kill the Sun Walkers that actually did the deed. The ones that didn’t want to bow down to him just… they were scared at how quickly Samael took over and felt like they had to blame someone for that, and the Sun Walkers were ultimately the only real outsiders there to blame,” Eliot says. “I think the vampires that didn’t want to accept Samael’s rule blamed the Sun Walker’s because having a common cause with those that did, by which I mean condemning the Sun Walkers, made it less likely that the schism in their politics would lead to war. The two vampire wars that you did document were actually pretty small, but the parties that were involved in it are enemies even now, according to the histories. That’s what I think. I think the vampires that didn’t support Samael condemned the Sun Walkers that killed him because it was the thing that was most likely to keep them from an internal war, and even that didn’t save the way it ruptured old alliances and realigned the power structures of their politics.” Eliot shrugs.

“Yeah,” Parker sighs, and lays her head down on Eliot’s shoulder. “That’s basically what I think, too. I think they were cowards for doing it, but I also don’t think they could have saved those Sun Walkers, even if they had come down on their side. The ones that actually killed Samael, I mean. I think they knew they couldn’t save them, so they basically offered them up like a sacrifice. Cowards, but I understand the reasoning behind it.”

“Me too,” Eliot says. “But there is one other thing, something you told me actually, that I think is the real reason they didn’t still end up in a war. They don’t like to kill their own kind. I feel like I may be missing something that points to why, exactly. I understand it on the small scale. The clan family scale, and even the clanless rogues, I understand why they don’t like killing their own kind in those kinds of cases. But I get the feeling that there is something more compelling that makes them not have wars. Not the way that humans do, anyway. Small wars, but two, in thousands of years? Humans have had more than twice as many in the last century. I don’t know what it is, though, that stops them. I almost wish I had some old vampires I could ask about it, about what stops them from killing each other, even though they plot against each other between clan families all the time. But it’s over petty stuff, rank and position, money, prestige, and they don’t kill each other over it. They sabotage each other’s ventures, they start rumors about other clan families, they do, occasionally, take out each other’s blood servants, but even that is rare. It’s far more likely for a couple of blood servants to get into it and kill each other without any direction from the clan families than for them to actually target each other’s servants.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what it is, but I get the idea that there is something I don’t know that keeps them from ever escalating things.”

“I don’t know either, and I read the original from start to finish. I read it twice actually, and almost three times if you count the rewriting of it. But I think you’re right, or I was right, or whatever. They don’t like killing each other. And I think it’s important that when the questions about why they betrayed the Sun Walkers start coming in, that we answer them with what we really believe. It doesn’t make what they did right, but it puts it into some kind of context.”

“I think it has something to do with the Link Marks,” Alec says, though he doesn’t stop typing, and he’s leaning slightly in toward his computer, which means he’s pretty focused on what he’s doing. But he adds, “Think of how many link marks a Master of a clan family has. In a war, anyone linked to you is in danger. If they sometimes go crazy because they have to kill their own progeny, what might it be like in a war, losing mark after mark. How crazy would that make you? What kind of things would you do to make that stop happening?”

He doesn’t elaborate, still clearly working, but Eliot and Parker exchange looks.

“It’s not a bad theory,” Parker says. She tugs the laptop out of Eliot’s hands and opens the Bloodlines and Lineages document. She scrolls through it until she gets to their territory, and then until she gets to Gabriel Romero Vega, and then goes more slowly. “I can’t be sure, because some of these vampires might have come into Caine from another clan family, and some of Gabriel’s progeny may have gone elsewhere in the world, but at a guess, I’d say that our Master of the City has to hold at least… thirty link marks. Maybe more, because some of the clan families descend from Caine. I mean, the Master of the clan family used to belong to Caine, and petitioned to create his or her own clan family. And then created progeny of their own, link marking them. Is it… could it be possible that a link mark, even a degree removed, could cause a vampire trauma if it were severed. I mean.”

“Is it like a web?” Eliot wonders. “Are they all tangled up together in link marks, so that when you kill one of them, every vampire that one had any kind of connection to, their creator, their creator’s creator, and so on, all the way up to the top, feel the link make break. Maybe it’s not as bad, the further up you go, but even still. Is it possible?” Eliot takes the laptop back and clicks back to the history file, back to Inona, the first vampire to make a link mark, and reads through that part again. It doesn’t say that she’d ever taught any of her brother’s or sisters the trick, but it doesn’t say that she hadn’t either. It just says that over a dozen dozen lifetimes, Inona’s children spread across the world. “We have all been so hung up on the vampires being the sons and daughters of Caine and Lilith,” Eliot says. “But as far as the history specifically states, it was Inona whose descendants spread across the world. Are they all tangled together, the link marks? Did they all originate with Inona?”

Parker shakes her head. “Not all. I’m sure some of the other children of Cain and Lilith figured it out. But don’t you see, now they’re all mixed up together. There’s no way to tell which line of link marks a vampire might have come from. I mean, some of it you can tell from the B&L document, but the change clans families, clan families merge, vampires leave their clan families to join the clan families of other vampires because they are in love, or whatever it is the vampires feel for each other. Any vampire you kill could be connected to a dozen more or twenty more, or, in this kind of vast time frame, even more than that. Any vampire you kill might be, to some degree, the progeny of your progeny or their progeny, or so on. You can’t tell by looking at them. You’d have to research their pedigree, and I’m betting that is what this B&L document is for, because before you challenge the Master of a Territory for control of that Territory, you want to make sure he or she is not in some way connected to you. And chances are, they’re not. Cain and Lilith supposedly had dozens of children. Less than a fifty, I’d say, or the language would have been grander, but plenty. So of course they’re not all in a direct line. But even if one bloodline startled a battle with another bloodline, it wouldn’t matter, because they don’t track it that way anymore. They track it my Territory, by geographic location, and there is no telling to what parts of the world your Master of Portland, just for example, where all his progeny have spread out to over the last seven hundred years. And he’s a small example. Older vampires would have more, maybe thousands of secondary and tertiary and so forth links that they don’t even know about. So that no matter what vampire you might want to kill, it’s possible that you were somewhere in the roots of their foundation, and might feel the backlash of a severed link mark. Maybe not badly, maybe not enough to make it stop you, if you wanted a Territory badly enough to kill for it, but enough that you feel it when they die.”

Her eyes are huge. Eliot only nods, astonished by the scope, but unable to think of another reason that makes as much sense as this particular theory.

“We can’t know for sure, but,” Eliot says, and just nods again. “It would make things make so much more sense.”

“If you ever get the chance, you should ask the Master of the City,” Parker says.

“Why would he tell me,” Eliot says doubtfully, but Parker merely shrugs.

“I don’t know that he would, but. I don’t think it could hurt to ask,” she says. Then she says, “Shit!” and snatches the laptop from Eliot and shoves it onto the coffee table. “We should have left ten minutes ago. Where are your keys, Eliot?”

“Alec, it going okay?” Eliot asks, looking for and finding his keys in the big tray by the door where they always throw things like car keys and wallets and change.

“I’ve got them right where I want them,” Alec says. “You two go on, I will probably be done by the time you get back.”

Parker grabs Eliot’s elbow and tries to hurry him toward the door.

“Parker, settle down, I’ll get you there on time. Where are we going?” Eliot asks.

Parker rattles off an address, and then just as quickly a set of directions, and Eliot gives in and jogs out the door and to the car because Parker is already in the passenger seat of the Mustang, glaring out the windshield at him.

Eliot maps it in his head, is pretty sure he can make it in about fifteen minutes, and asks, “What time are you supposed to be there?”

“Three o’clock,” Parker snaps.

“It’s only a little after 2:30, and I can make this drive in twenty minutes tops, Parker,” he says. “Cool your jets.”

“Google maps says it’s a twenty-eight minute drive,” Parker says.

“Google maps isn’t combat trained to drive, or equipped with a Mustang as nice as mine,” he reassures her. “I promise, I’ll get you there on time.”

Parker relaxes fractionally, but still drums her fingers on the armrest all the way up to the point where they’re turning onto the right street, at which point she says, “I’m sorry, she’s just doing me a favor, and we used to sleep together, and I don’t want her to think I don’t appreciate it,” all rushed and in one breath.

“We still have eleven minutes, and we’re here,” Eliot says. “She’s not going to think bad things about you, Parker.”

Parker slumps back into the car seat and takes several deep breaths. “I… still care what she thinks of me,” she says, like it’s a confession.

“It’s okay to still care, Parker,” Eliot says softly. “It’s okay if you still like her or find her attractive or whatever it is that has got you all twisted up. We’re here early, and she’s probably nervous about seeing you again, too.” He throws that last out as not quite a guess, he can feel her nerves in the link, but the cause of the nerves is a guess, that it’s seeing her old lover.

“Do you think so?” Parker asks plaintively, turning large eyes on him, looking hopeful.

“Yes,” Eliot says. “But it’s going to be fine. Come on, let’s get out of the car and actually go see her, and you’ll see it’s going to be fine.”

Parker unsnaps her seatbelt and opens the door, so Eliot does the same, waiting until she’s got the car closed to use the fob to lock it. The address is a house, not a shop, and actually looking at it, is less of a house and close to a mansion, brown and red fieldstone with rough cut timber accents, three stories, surrounded by what is a very large lawn or a fairly small set of grounds, depending on how you look at it. It’s certainly maintained to within an inch of its life, with flowerbeds and contoured bushes, and vines crawling across a trellis along the west side of the almost-mansion. There is more land in the back, but Eliot can’t tell how far it stretches. The house is wide enough to block the back lawn. There is a black Lexus parked in front of a four car garage, which Eliot had pulled right up next to, since Parker hadn’t said to do otherwise, and the drive is huge, big enough that it cuts oddly into the lawn or grounds or whatever they call it. Big enough for more than a dozen cars, maybe as many as twenty. The Lexus is the only other car in the drive at the moment, and Eliot resists the urge to peek in the garage windows and see what other cars might be hidden in there.

Parker smoothes her skirt, straightens her shoulders, and heads toward the house. Eliot falls into step beside her, and they follow first the paved drive, and then a cobblestone walk up to the front door. Set to one side of the door is a marble and bronze sign that says: Members Only.

Parker reaches out and rings the bell.

Eliot considers the sign, and what it means about the house, which is that it really isn’t a house, or, at least, is not a private residence. The man who answers the door is in a black suit with a short coat, and Eliot hasn’t spent a lot of time with servants, but he’s dressed as one a time or two, for cons, and this is clearly some kind of servant answering the door.

“Miss Parker,” he says, nodding and gesturing for her to precede him inside, smiling. “It has been too long since you visited us. You look lovely as always. Please do come in.” He gestures Eliot in as well.

“Hi, Gerard,” Parker says, with a small but apparently genuine smile for the man. “How are you?”

“I am well, thank you for inquiring. May I get you a refreshment of some kind?” Gerard asks. His accent isn’t British, but it’s short and clipped and it would sound right coming from him, if it was.

“No, but thanks. I’m just here to see Amy, whenever she’s ready.”

“Miss Amelia has been expecting you. I’m to show you up directly.” Gerard gives a little half-nod, half-bow toward a wide mahogany staircase with and oriental runner leading up to it, and then leads the way to the stairs and up them. Eliot doesn’t get much of a look at anything but the foyer, but it says tasteful old money to him. Gerard leads them down a wide hall with sets of double doors set along them every so often, and the house is longer than it had looked from outside, almost certainly more of a small mansion than a house. He stops at the third set of double doors. Eliot notices that the knobs are cut crystal. Not glass, but real crystal. Gerard knocks on the doors, but doesn’t wait for an answer. He opens them both, and leads Parker and Eliot into what Eliot thinks of as a waiting area, but is pretty sure would probably be called a parlor. It’s decorated all in rose and gold, down to the pale carpet and all the way up to the crown molding. “She will be with you momentarily,” Gerard says, and bows a little again, and then leaves them in the waiting area.

Parker sighs and flops into a rose colored chair. Eliot sits a little more carefully on a gold painted, weirdly delicate little spindly chair with a rose colored cushion on the seat, choosing it more because it’s next to the more comfortable chair Parker has flopped into than because he wants to sit in it.

“Are you okay?” he murmurs, because Parker’s nerves have retreated almost entirely, there still, but background, muted by irritation.

“Yes. I was hoping we weren’t going to get the whole show,” she says, sounding pissy. “I knew I shouldn’t have told her I wouldn’t be coming alone.”

Eliot wants to ask what the whole show is, but the door on the wall next to the door that leads into the hall opens, and a man comes out dressed in a leather harness and not a lot more. He’s wearing gloves that keep his hands curled into fists, and a collar around his throat. There is something around his hips that keeps him from flashing the whole room, though if Eliot were looking at him from another angle, he’s pretty sure he’d be able to see both of his ass cheeks. And he’s crawling. A petite brunette with a bob dressed in a flowing silken robe with ruffles and lace at the throat and long loose sleeves is holding the end of a leash that leads down to the man’s collar. She crosses the room to the approximate center, her… dog crawling along beside her, and looks down at Parker.

Parker stands up, so Eliot stands up, too.

“Amy,” Parker says. “This is Eliot. He’s with me, so please don’t try to recruit him.”

The woman, Amy, laughs, and it sounds genuine. “I’m glad you told me,” she says, sounding cheerful and relaxed. “He’s definitely pretty enough to try to recruit.”

Eliot feels his eyebrows shoot toward his hairline at being referred to as ‘pretty,’ but doesn’t actually say anything about it.

“I thought this was going to be just a simple favor,” Parker says, and gestures at the man on his hand and knees. Now that he’s closer, Eliot can see that he has a tail that is either affixed to the harness he’s wearing, or is in some other way being held in place. He can’t quite help from thinking how that might be, and he pulls on his blandest soldier face to keep from blushing. “If it’s going to be a production, I’ll take a pass.” Parker’s voice is clipped and unhappy.

Amy’s smile fades a little, and she says, “I’ll admit, I had some hope of tempting you. He’s barely trained. Perfect for you. But I had no desire to create a production.”

“You live in a production,” Parker says, but almost weirdly gently. “I know that, and I will let you have a pass for bringing a stranger to something that’s private for me because you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t at least try to tempt me with something. But if you’re still willing to do this for me, he has to go. I called you because I trust you know what you’re doing, but I’ll take my chances with getting a recommendation from someone else and getting it done professionally if you feel like you have to push my boundaries.”

The smile on Amy’s perfectly made up face fades to just the faint curl of lips. “I wish you’d come back to us,” she says. “Your friend would be more than welcome.”

“I’m not really in a place in my life where I have time for this,” Parker says with a little shrug. “But even if I was, I think I’ve mostly outgrown it.”

“Damn,” Amy sighs. She wraps the leash in her hand around the arm of a chair, and says, “Wait here for Gerard.”

“All right, come on back,” Amy says, and leads the way into the room she’d come out of. It’s a kinky bedroom/bordello/harem type room. Eliot isn’t at all sure what the right set of descriptors would be. She pushes an intercom button.

A moment later, Gerard’s voice, made a little tinny through the speaker says, “Yes, ma’am?”

“Could I trouble you to take Peter and give him over to Lena for the next hour or so. I’m going to be occupied, and his presence is going to be intrusive.”

“Right away, Miss Amelia,” Gerard says.

She turns back to parker, and says, “You look fantastic. Whatever you’re doing, it’s apparently good for you.”

“It is,” Parker says simply. “Thank you for doing this.”

“Thank you for calling me to do it,” Amy says, sounding serious. “The idea of you in some shop with your legs up in stirrups is enough to give me nightmares. I’ll make sure it’s done right.”

“That’s why I called you,” Parker says. “When I decided to do it. I don’t want a scene, though, Amy. Just the basics.”

“Such a shame, though,” Amy says, apparently genuinely disappointed. “It’d make such a lovely scene. I’m sure your… Eliot would appreciate it.”

Parker looks at Eliot for a long moment, as though considering it. “He might if he were the one doing it, but he doesn’t have the experience, and I want this to be private.”

“So this is for him?” Amy asks, giving Eliot an uncomfortably lingering once over.

“For us,” Parker says, though she doesn’t mention Alec. Eliot gets the feeling that Parker is trying to keep this as professional as things can get when you’ve asked your ex-lover to pierce your clit.

“Some men faint,” Amy says, sounding a little amused. It isn’t clear if she’s talking to Parker or Eliot.

“Trust me, Eliot is not a fainter,” Parker says firmly.

“Okay, then,” she says, and walks over to a vaguely chair shaped object covered by a satiny black length of sheeting. “No panties?”

“No,” Parker says. “I know the drill.”

The chair shaped object turns out to be a chair, sort of. It’s kind of a lounge chair, except the legs are separated and spread. There are leather cuffs dangling above the chair and at the ends of both sections of the leg rests. Amy swings the cuffs above the chair up and hooks them to the wall, clearly just to get the out of the way, and says, “Take a seat.”

The chair is a little on the tall side, and Parker has to actually hop up a little to get her butt on the seat, but she drags her skirt up around her waist without batting an eyelash, and positions her legs along the spread legrests of the chair contraption. Eliot can’t help but think of all the things he could do to her in the position she’s sitting in, legs spread wide, everything clearly visible. Parker catches him looking, and smirks at him a little.

“You can watch if you want,” Parker says. “But if you don’t care, you could come hold my hand.”

She sounds like she’s fine with it either way, but Eliot knows Parker, and she is not a hand holder. If she’s offering to let him hold her hand, it’s because she feels like she needs a hand to hold, and while he’s theoretically interested in seeing it done, that’s not as important to him as Parker being as okay as Parker can be while it’s being done. He circles around the chair to her side and takes her hand in his. She squeezes his hand.

“We don’t have to do this,” Eliot says, feeling her nerves.

She laughs a little. “I want to do it. I’ve just never done it before and I’m nervous. It’s okay, Eliot. Amy is an expert.”

Amy has wheeled over a little tray and uncovered an assortment of things in sterile packaging, which she’s picking through carefully. “Did you bring what you wanted with you?” she asks.

Parker bangs her head against the back of the chair. “No. We left in a hurry and I forgot it. Shit.”

“No worries, I’ve got pretty much anything you might want.” She reaches up onto a shelf that Eliot has just noticed is displaying a huge variety of dildos, and brings down a long, shallow plastic container with about a hundred little cubbies in it, all filled with different rings and barbells in all shapes and sizes and even colors. “Find something you like.”

Parker looks at Eliot. “I had picked out a more or less plain ring, and Alec was on board with it. I should have asked you, too, but I was distracted.”

“Whatever you want is fine with me,” Eliot says, looking at the row upon row of piercings. He finds a plain silver ring with a silver ball, and points to it. “Like that?”

Parker considers it, and then points to another of the rings, slightly bigger, though the part that would actually pierce Parker’s flesh is still pretty slender. “More like that one,” she says. “Something you could get ahold of with your tongue.”

“Does it have to be silver?” Eliot asks, a little surprised to discover he has an opinion, but in the next cubby over, an almost identical ring has caught his eye.

“No,” she says. “Silver is the only color I had on hand, but we can pick out a different color if you want.”

Eliot points to the gold ring. “It matches… you,” he says, feeling a little ridiculous at hearing himself say it, but it does.

She smiles at him, and he feels her warmly for a moment in the link. “We’ll do that, then,” she says, sounding very faintly pleased.

Amy is watching them, and when Parker picks up the gold ring, she nods and takes it. “It’s surgical grade titanium treated for that color of finish. He’s right, it matches you. It’s a good choice.” She unscrews the bead that holds it together and drops both ring and bead into a tiny glass of colorless liquid that could be water, but which Eliot is betting is alcohol. She moves over to a tiny sink that is almost hidden in the row of shelves, and begins scrubbing at her hands.

Eliot shifts his grip on Parker’s hand so that their fingers are linked, and she settles back against the back of the chair, looking calm, and feeling more or less steady in the link. There is a faint crackle of nerves hovering so far back that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been focused on the link, but she doesn’t feel afraid. Not that Parker would be.

Amy dries her hands with sheets of paper towels and then moves back to the tray and snaps on a pair of black nitrile gloves.

“Okay, kiddo, forceps or fingers?” she asks.

“Whichever you feel like you’re better at,” Parker says. “Honestly, I’m too nervous to be turned on right now, so your fingers won’t bother me.”

Amy picks up a sterile needle package and pops it open. Parker squeezes Eliot’s hand. Eliot squeezes gently back, and says, “It’s not too late to back out,” smiling, but serious.

“It’ll only hurt for a little bit, really,” Parker says, which is true. Eliot will blood heal her at the first available opportunity. “Besides, this is supposed to be kind of spectacular for me if it’s done right.”

“It is,” Amy says. “And I swear, kiddo, I will do it right.”

“I know you will,” Parker says. “I’m ready.”

Eliot can’t see anything happening between Parker’s legs from where he is, but he feels her stiffen and hiss, and instinctively turns her wrist toward his lips, turns his back to Amy, and his fangs drop. He buries them gently in Parker’s wrist, and her eyes widen for a moment, and then he feels her relax, both her hand in his, and her mind in the link.

“Almost done,” Amy says, “You’re doing great.”

Eliot swallows a mouthful of her blood, salty and flowery, and she sighs a little as he drinks.

“And that’s it,” Amy says. Eliot pulls his mouth away from Parker’s wrist and licks the punctured closed before turning back to face Amy. “You know all the rules on how to keep it clean. You’ve helped do enough of them. Don’t get cocky and mess with it before it’s nice and healed up, though. It will just make it heal slower.” She looks at Eliot. “You’re going to have to take care of yourself for a while.”

“I’ll be fine,” Eliot says, and looks at Parker. Her brow is faintly furrowed in discomfort, but she looks almost a little surprised.

“This does not hurt anywhere near as much as I expected it to,” she says.

“That’s because it’s done right,” Amy says. “Don’t let it fool you. It’s still an open wound, and you need to take care of it the way you would almost any open wound. Do I have to give you the speech. Because if you’ve forgotten it, I can spell out the consequences of not treating it right while it’s healing.”

“No, I remember all the do’s and don’t’s,” Parker says, and smiles at Amy. “Thank you.”

For a moment, Eliot sees a flicker of calculation on Amy’s face, as though she’s thinking of what she might be able to ask in return for the favor, but then she just shakes her head. “Don’t thank me until you try walking with it in, kiddo,” she says. “And maybe keep in touch a little better, so that I know you’re alive somewhere out there.”

Parker gingerly gets to her feet and lets her skirt fall down around her calves. She takes a couple of careful steps, not wincing, but her face kind of neutral.

“I can carry you out to the car,” Eliot says, not really joking.

She smiles, and says, “I can manage, Eliot.”

Eliot turns to look a Amy. “Thanks,” he says, because he isn’t sure what else to say.

“Enjoy it in good health. After it heals, of course,” Amy says. “Now get out of here before Lena spoils my puppy before I can stop her.”

The only way that Eliot can tell that Parker is in any way injured is that she walks without her normal, swinging gait, taking careful steps. She’s a little slower than usual, but not by much. Eliot doesn’t have to stop and wait for her to catch up with him or anything. Still, when she settles into the passenger seat of the Mustang, she sighs and spreads her legs as wide as the space will allow.

“Pull up your skirt,” Eliot says, and she gives him a faintly amused look.

“It’s not that bad. It can wait for us to get home,” she says.

“But why should you?” Eliot asks. “Nobody can see what we’re doing and it’ll take maybe a minute.”

She cocks her head a little, then pulls her skirt up her legs to pool around her waist. “Just a second,” she says, sliding her hand between the seat and the door and finding the lever that leans the seat back into a reclining position. She arches and reaches under her, pulling the back of her skirt up, too. “I don’t want to get blood on it,” she says, and then spreads her legs, slinging the left one up and over so that it intrudes onto his side of the car, her knee cocked over the gear shift. She reaches down with one hand and spreads the golden curls of her pubes, parting her labia, so that Eliot can see everything there is to see. Eliot sternly tells himself that this is not an invitation as he starts to firm up in his jeans, and lets himself take a look at the ring. The flesh around the piercing site is a little red and angry looking, but the ring itself is exotic and erotic, and looks like it passes through the actual clit itself, which Eliot hadn’t quite expected, though he isn’t sure why. He’d thought it would go above, or maybe just through the hood.

“Are you going to heal it, or just stare at it?” Parker asks, smiling at him from where she’s leaning back in the seat.

“Sorry. It… uh.” He decides not to finish the sentence, and knicks his fingertip with his fangs and squeezes, then reaches between her legs, gently lifting the ring up to get to the piercing site, and tips his finger to drip blood as directly onto it as he can. The blood slides along the metal of the ring and Eliot watches, a little fascinated, as the skin around the piercing loses the reddened, tender look. He knicks his finger again and drip a little more blood on the other side just in case, but Parker sighs a little before the second dose of blood even hits her exposed flesh, and he probably didn’t need the extra blood. He twists the ring a little, just to make sure the blood on it makes it’s way inside the piercing site, and her breath catches.

“It’s healed,” she says. “And you have to stop playing with it, or things might get out of hand. There are alcohol wipes in the glove box. Clean the blood off so it doesn’t get on my skirt?”

Eliot isn’t sure he’s ever wanted to play with anything more than he wants to play with her new piercing, keeps that information to himself and gets out a wipe and cleans the blood out from around the ring, wiping the ring itself down, too, until Parker objects, “Eliot!” and he guiltily pulls his hand away. She twists around until her skirt is back in its proper position, and then raises the seat until it’s upright again. Her cheeks are pink.

Eliot has to shift in his seat to find a position that his hard on will let him drive halfway comfortably in. “So. It’s good?” he asks.

She grins. “Yeah,” she says. “And after the blood healing, it’s… sensitive.”

Eliot starts the engine of the Mustang, and Parker makes a very faint, surprised sound. Eliot looks over at her. “Did we not get it healed all the way?” he asks, concerned, and she looks a little sheepish.

“It’s healed all the way. I can just sort of feel the vibration of the engine in a way I wasn’t expecting.” She gazes at him through her lashes, still looking a little sheepish. “I hope it settles down at least a little. Otherwise, just wearing pants might be enough to…” She shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out,” she says philosophically.

Eliot, not sure what he can really do about her apparently oversensitive clit at the moment, pulls around the circle of the drive and back out onto the street. Parker doesn’t make any more noises, but she fidgets a little, hands twisting in her lap. Eliot is torn between amusement, sympathy, and arousal, and several times has to remind himself to at least stay reasonably close to the speed limit.


	45. Chapter 45

Alec is still sitting at his computer when they get home, though he’s leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his neck, looking smug, so he’s probably done with the actual hacking. “I have fucked their shit up,” he announces proudly.

“Excellent,” Eliot says. “If you can gloat later, we have a girl here with an extremely sensitive new piercing that I’m pretty sure we can drive nearly insane if we get her into bed.”

Alec stands up so quickly that his wheeled chair rolls several feet away. “I’m there,” he says immediately, looking at Parker closely. “All went well, I’m assuming then.”

“I want to have an orgasm,” Parker says, and pulls off her blouse and lets it drop to the floor. She tugs her skirt down over her hips and kicks off her sandals, and stands there naked in the living room. “Right now,” she insists.

Eliot takes her by the elbow and leads her to the couch, and she lets him press her down onto it, but immediately swings one leg up over the arm and props the foot of the other leg up on the edge of the coffee table. She slides both hands between her legs, spreading her cunt lips open and displaying the golden ring, and then she catches it between one thumb and forefinger and tugs gently, letting out a sighing little moan.

Eliot and Alec both step forward at once, and then look at each other.

“I had to stay here and work, man,” Alec says, not quite whining, but coming close.

Eliot would like to argue that he had to drive home with a killer erection, but Parker makes a low, throaty noise, and his train of thought is entirely derailed. While he’s trying to get it back on track, Alec steps around the end of the coffee table and drops to his knees, the sneaky fucker, where he gently disengages Parker’s hand from the ring and presses his mouth to it, gently at first, just pressure, but it’s still enough to make Parker release a little trill of want that drags at Eliot from the pit of his belly and all the way up his spine. Alec flicks his tongue across the ring, and then catches it gently in his teeth, and Parker’s hips arch and she makes high, breathy noises that want to be cries, but don’t quite make it that far. Then Alec really goes to work on her, with lips and teeth and tongue, and Eliot can’t get a very good look at what he’s doing, just that it’s driving Parker crazy, her hips rocking and both of her hands pressed to the back of Alec’s head to keep him where she wants him, and she shrills out her first orgasm in under two minutes with something that sounds almost like surprise. Her grip on Alec abruptly reverses itself, and she’s pushing him away, her face flushed and her eyes dazed.

Eliot half expects her to say it’s too much, she’s too oversensitive, but instead she says, “I need the cuffs. I want…” She looks up at Eliot, and her eyes are shiny with unshed tears. “I want to try,” she says, her voice unsteady, and he sees that she’s gripping Alec’s shoulders hard, as though she’s afraid that more than just her voice will shake.

Eliot takes an instinctive step forward, but Alec stands, his mouth and chin slick with her wetness, and says, “I”ve got her, go get the cuffs ready,” and Eliot turns and sprints into the bedroom, reaching between the mattress and the headboard to where the cuffs always get shoved when they aren’t using them. He looks at them for a long moment. There are some indentations from the buckle in the leather near the first and seconds sets of holes, but none in the last set, the size that has never been used because they had been made for Parker’s wrists, and Parker has never had them on.

Alec carries her into the bedroom and deposits her gently on the bed. “Make the straps longer,” he says. “I”ve got an idea.”

Eliot doesn’t ask, just reaches down and unties the leather from the ring it’s attached to and ties it closer to the end of the strap, then repeats it with the other cuff. He knows how to tie good knots. A little bit from Ranger training, but lately, mostly from Parker showing him how when using the cuffs on Alec.

“Yeah, that’s good, that should work,” Alec says, and picks Parker up again, shifting her this time so that she’s sitting upright, half on her knees. With the longer cuffs, there is a good two and a half feet between the cuffs and the headboard, and Eliot gets a flash of an image from Alec, either deliberate or just strong enough to come through anyway, of Parker on her knees with Alec behind her, inside her, and Eliot leaning down between her spread thighs. 

Eliot has absolutely no objection to this.

Alec has picked up one of the cuffs, and is looking carefully at Parker. Her eyes are still wide and a little wet, her lashes a little spikey, though there are no tears on her face, but Eliot can feel her, aroused and wanting, but with spiky little prickles of fear shooting through the sensation of her in his mind.

“You ready?” Alec asks her, and takes her left wrist in a gentle grip, holding the cuff in his free hand.

She nods and swallows, her eyes still huge and looking a little dazed, but there is definitely want spilling through the links. Eliot says, “If it’s not good, all you have to do is say so, Parker,” as gently as he can, stroking her hair back away from her face and running his hands down her shoulders. “But you’re safe with us. We will always make sure you’re safe.”

“I know,” she says, and she’s trembling now, and there are goosebumps on her breasts, and she exhales a shaky breath and then just nods. 

Alec pulls the cuff around her left wrist and buckles it in the last notch, the one measured specifically to fit her, drawing the leather tight around her wrist. She twists her arm a little, a little flash of panic which she quickly shoves away. Eliot, since he’s already on her other side, picks up her right wrist, feels the tremors in the muscles of her arms, and raises it to his lips and kisses it. Then he wraps the leather around the delicate bones of her wrist and buckles it closed. She hitches in a little breath, and twists that wrist, too, not hard, not fighting, but just as though she’s testing it, and then she whispers, “Don’t stop now, I can’t think about it or I’m going to freak out.”

Alec and Eliot both move at the same time, Alec climbing up to the head of the bed and getting behind her, his hands cupping her breasts for a moment, tugging at her nipples, Eliot bending almost double over his knees, trying to figure out a good angle, but then Alec is lifting her up, and settling her onto his cock, not even a little gently, but just positioning her and pulling her whole body down so that she takes him all at once. It seems like the right thing to do, as her back arches, her wrists tugged back and downward, away from the front of her body, and she let’s out a low, desperate sound that twists in the link, want and something sharper and more immediate. 

She’s at a better height, with her thighs spread across the top of Alec’s, and Eliot can see Alec’s dark cock thrust up inside her pink flesh, and he’s sure he must have seen it before, but never from this close up or this exact angle, and it looks fucking amazing, makes Eliot feel like his skin is peeling itself away from every sensitive spot on his body, leaving only exposed and overstimulated nerve endings, his cock rock hard and aching, his balls already dense, and tightly drawn up to his body. He’s aware of how needful his own body is, but it also seems a little distant, too, with Parker right there and her link flickering through need and pleasure with faint bursts of fear and nerves, and the ring through her clit is perfect, he’s immensely pleased that he’d asked about the gold one, it just matches her so perfectly. Alec is stroking into her, but slowly, even as her thighs flex and she tries to speed things up, and Eliot realizes that Alec is doing it for him, to keep her still enough for him to get his mouth on her, and he surges forward and drags his tongue from the base of Alec’s shaft where it is buried inside her, all the way to the top of her clit, flicking the ring with his tongue as he does it, hearing her cry out and feeling her spike with pleasure in the link. Then he can’t keep himself from focusing on the ring, tugging at it with his teeth, gently until he can feel the way that it’s driving her need into a tight upward spiral, and then a little harder, making her let out little cries, half-pain, but in a good way, he can tell that it’s good, that she wants it. He catches it with the tip of his tongue and sucks it into his mouth, along with the silky, swollen flesh of her clit, and her hips twist as she bucks up against his face.

Alec is riding into her a little harder now, and she is pulling at her wrists, and Eliot chances a look up at her face, and sees that there are tears on her cheeks, but that her expression is almost beatific, more than that, even, Eliot isn’t even sure of the right word, something that goes past ecstasy and closes in on _rapture_ , and he holds that image in his mind and focuses for a few seconds, long enough to try to convey it to Alec, and they really need to set up some mirrors in this room, because Alec shouldn’t have to miss the look on her face right now and there had been times that Eliot had wished he could have seen. But the thought streaks through his mind and is gone in an instant, his attention on her body and her cunt and the ring and the _feel_ of her in the link, and she is jerking at the cuffs now, but he can tell she doesn’t want to get away so he doesn’t worry about it, he’ll ask her later why, all that matters now is that she is vibrating, her hips jerking even with Alec’s hands holding her mostly still. He drags at the ring with his tongue, then tugs at it with his teeth, and then closes his lips around her clit, ring and all, and swirls his tongue around, presses and jabs with his tongue, and she screams, a real scream, loud and a little shocking, but a good sound, something Eliot feels in the link and along every ultra sensitive nerve in his body, and her whole body shudders, jerking and shaking like she’s coming apart, and Alec groans, “Parker, God, Parker,” into her hair, slamming into her now, the momentum of his movements making Eliot have to work hard to keep his mouth on her, his tongue working her over, and then she stiffens, her whole body taut and straining against Eliot’s mouth, against Alec’s cock, and his body behind her, against the cuffs around her wrists, and she screams again, this time with words.

“Please, I, god, I can’t, oh fuck, I....” which hardly means anything, but means enough, and Eliot can feel her coming, not just in her body or even just in the link, but almost as though it crackles through the air around her, like she’s projecting it outward, and he wonders very briefly if it’s her uncommonly strong mental gifts, but he doesn’t have the attention to spare to really consider it, is intent on making her ride it out, making it last for as long as she can take it, and Alec shouts and shudders, slamming up into her, spiking with intense pleasure in the link, but he doesn’t stop fucking her even as he comes, like he is with Eliot, and they are united in their desire to drive her as far as she can go. Then she is shuddering, her whole body convulsing, and she feels in the link like she is collapsing, but in a good way, something she has wanted and needed to have for a long time and hasn’t had, and she goes loose against Alec, her muscles just relax as she shudders through climax, and Eliot eases the pressure of his lips and tongue and teeth, but doesn’t stop entirely until he can feel her in the link, still and placid, like the surface of a deep lake, not even a ripple in her calm, and Alec has gone still, too, is just letting her rest back against him.

Eliot glances up, and her eyes are red rimmed and there are still tears on her face, but she is smiling, sweet and open, totally artless and completely at peace. He pulls back from the ring with a little pang of disappointment, because it’s perfect, she’s perfect, but he doesn’t want to disturb that sense of her, that stillness and calm.

Two or three minutes pass, with her limp and silent and utterly relaxed, open in the link, projecting love and pleasure and satisfaction and passion and gratitude and all of it gently, as if she’s floating in those sensations and they are just getting a feel of how it feels to be Parker for those two or three minutes. Neither of them move, letting her have that peace for as long as she can linger in it, and then, finally, she lifts her head up off of Alec’s shoulder, tear tracks still on her face, but her eyes bright with life and energy and she smiles, a slow spread of her lips that grows wider and wider until she actually starts to laugh, bright and throaty at the same time.

“Yes,” she says, to them both, and maybe to herself. “I didn’t think I could feel like this anymore, and it was never like this, never this good before. Thank you. I needed that so much.” She leans back to press kisses against Alec’s jaw and then tries to reach for Eliot, the gesture aborted by her bound wrists, but he goes to her anyway, and she kisses his cheeks and his jaw and his chin, light, feathery kisses that have nothing to do with lust and everything to do with happiness and gratitude.

Eliot doesn’t need the gratitude, he would do this, or anything else, for her, anytime she wants it, but her happiness, her deep and tender joy in having them with her, in what they had given her, makes him feel better than he ever has even on his best day, and he can feel Alec feeling the same, and a kind of aching compassion all mixed up with desire for her, and pleasure, just sheer and uncomplicated pleasure at being able to give her this thing, this feeling, which is so clearly something she treasures.

“Anything you want,” Eliot says. “Everything you want, Parker.” He feels like he should be able to do better, but he means it, at least, and he knows she can feel his sincerity, and words haven’t ever been his best thing.

Alec echoes, “Always. Anytime,” and Eliot feels a little better about not being able to articulate all that he means, because Alec is feeling the same lack of the right words, and Alec is usually much better with words than Eliot.

“Unlock the cuffs, now?” she asks, but not urgently, just like she’s gotten what she needs from them, and doesn’t need them anymore. They each take one hand, and she’s unbuckled in just a few seconds, and then she reaches for Eliot and drags him up the bed to press against her, leaving her pinned between the two of them in a way that she would normally not be able to deal with for more than a handful of seconds, but she holds them there, one hand wrapped around Eliot’s lower back, the other lifted up and holding the back of Alec’s neck, and just breathes, relaxed and still and settled in her body and her mind. Eliot carefully puts his arms around her, feels Alec doing the same, and they hold her, and she lets them for longer than she ever has been able to before, and it’s good, but it’s not, Eliot realizes, really necessary. It’s nice to hold her, it’s a comfort, but he doesn’t need it when she can’t deal with it. It doesn’t make anything between them less.

He pulls away first, because he doesn’t want to wait until she starts to feel like she has to do it, and Alec seems to have the same idea, as he eases her off his cock and then gently down onto the bed. She folds her legs up tailor fashion, her smile easy and happy.

“Eliot,” she says, his name an oddly cheerful sigh through her lips. “I think you definitely got the raw end of that particular deal.”

She’s looking at his flushed and still hard cock, but Eliot just isn’t that worried about it. “I got exactly what I wanted from it,” he says truthfully, and she smiles at him.

“Even so,” she says. “I think we can help you take care of that. Can I fuck you? I want to try it with the ring, see if it’s different.”

“You can absolutely fuck me,” Eliot says, and Alec gets up and goes to the toy cabinet for her harness and Eliot’s favorite red dildo. 

She doesn’t tie him down, and opens him slowly and gently, even though Eliot’s cock is already drooling precome down onto his belly, and the dildo is small enough that he doesn’t really need that much prep. She fucks him almost as slowly, every stroke nailing his prostate and making him huff out harsh little breathy sounds of pleasure. She murmurs, “I don’t mean to tease, but I’m still really sensitive right now,” and he pants and sweats beneath her, but takes it however she wants to give it, and then Alec is there, leaning down and taking Eliot into his mouth, and he’s come a long way since that first time, which is saying something. Eliot cries out hoarsely at being caught between them, Parker going slow and easy, and Alec taking him in fast and deep, all the way into his throat, so that Eliot bucks helplessly up into it, and then Alec’s lips and tongue and teeth, demanding and urgent, and Eliot actually thrashes a little, his body outside his control. Alec catches his wrists and holds them down, and Parker presses into him a little harder and faster, though still not as hard or as fast as she usually fucks him, but Eliot has been turned on for a long time, and he doesn’t last very long between the two of them, and only when he’s growling a little and so close to coming that he can feel it twisting in his balls does Parker really shove into him, and even then it’s just twice, slamming his prostate hard, and she cries out, her fingers gripping at his thighs so tightly he thinks he might bruise as she comes even as he is finally coming, a jangling rush of sensation that is as much relief as pleasure, and Alec swallows him down, and then gently licks him clean.

“Fuck,” Eliot says after a minute or so. And then, because he’s dying to know, “How was the ring with the dildo?”

“Too good,” Parker says a little ruefully. “I hope just because I was already all worked up, and it will be a little less like I’m about to come on every stroke the next time we do it, but yeah. As sensitive as I was, it was too good to really focus on you. But I have other dildos that don’t have anything for me to ride against, if it turns out to be a problem. And since it’s totally healed, I can take it out when I fuck you if it really becomes an issue.”

“Probably just that you were so worked up,” Eliot says, and is pretty sure it’s true, but isn’t that worried about it if it isn’t. There is at least a little bit of charm in having Parker drive herself just as crazy as she drives him when she fucks him. “And I don’t mind if you have to take it slow.”

“Yeah, but sometimes _I_ mind,” she says, grinning. “And don’t lie, sometimes you’ll want it harder and faster, too.” She shrugs, her breasts rippling fascinatingly. “We’ll work it out.” She sounds supremely unworried. She is giving him a long, appraising look, longer than any look Eliot can remember being on the receiving end from her before. “We don’t have to pierce you, Eliot. It’s not like we’re going to feel like we’re getting short changed it you don’t want your cock pierced.”

Eliot considers that for a long moment. “Tell me, though,” he says finally. “Is piercing my cock going to be as good for all of us as piercing Alec’s nipples and your clit has been?”

She doesn’t even hesitate. “It will be, once it’s done and healed, but that still doesn’t make it necessary.”

Eliot shrugs. “You still think you can hold my mind in yours while you do the piercing, so that I’m not really present for the part where you jab needles into my cock?” he asks. “Because I’m not afraid of a little pain, but I’m not wired like Alec is. I’m pretty sure for me it’s just going to hurt.”

She nods solemnly. “I’m pretty sure you’re right. But, yeah, I think I can make that part be… apart from you. I’ve actually practiced a little on Alec, but I’m pretty sure I can hold you as long as you don’t actively fight my hold on your mind.”

“Then I’m pretty much up for it,” Eliot says. “Maybe not today, but the next time we have the time and don’t have to be anywhere for a while afterward, while I try them out.”

She nods, and Alec is grinning a little, like he is trying to be secretive about how much he likes the idea, and is failing.

Eliot pretends not to notice him failing not to be excited. Honestly, Alec being excited about it is half the reason Eliot is agreeing to it. Or maybe not half, but a good chunk of the reason anyway.

“We need showers,” Eliot says, because if he lingers in bed with them for much longer, he’s probably going to break down and ask Parker to use her vampire hard on trick on him again, just because spending the day fucking them would be fantastic.

“Definitely showers,” Parker agrees, and slowly pulls out of him. Alec reaches around and unbuckles her harness for her, and she smiles and stands and steps out of it, separating the dildo from the leather, but just setting them both on the dresser for the time being.

They make their way into the master bath with only a little groping and touching, and then watch while Parker digs around in the drawers of the bathroom vanity until she finds a hand mirror. She props one foot up on the toilet and spreads herself open with her fingers and holds the mirror down where she can see the piercing and just looks. “Can one of you lift it up for me?” she asks, glancing up at them, her eyes bright. 

Eliot happens to be closer, so he steps in and gets a good looks at her pink and sex swollen flesh, pierced by the hoop of gold. It’s enough to make him want her again, to make her come again, but he just lifts the loop up and tries to keep his fingers out of the way so she can get a good look at it from every angle.

“You were right,” she says. “The gold is perfect.” Her voice is a little breathy, but mostly she just sounds pleased. “It was good luck, leaving the one we had picked out at home by accident.”

She pulls the mirror away, and Eliot reluctantly slides his fingers away from the piercing, and then she straightens up and slides the mirror onto the countertop and leans into Eliot, kissing his chest almost absently. 

“Good choice, Eliot,” she says. “I wonder if we should try a different color on your cock piercings.”

“I don’t think I have an opinion,” Eliot says. “I can’t even picture in my head what they’re going to look like.”

Alec cocks his head a little at that, and then says, “The shower can wait a few minutes, come with me.”

Parker says, “Good idea, Alec,” like she knows what he is talking about, and the two of them lead him back into the living area, all three of them still naked. Alec bends over his desk without sitting, and Eliot wishes he’d had a little more time to recover, because he can imagine bending Alec over his desk, remembers what Alec had said about it, and the idea is enough to make his cock twitch a little, even if it isn’t recovered enough to do anything about it. As he’s having his little mini-fantasy, Alec is pulling up a file and opening a window, and Eliot is abruptly looking at someone’s cock, pierced through the head. It looks like it goes through just beneath the glans and comes out through the slit, and he winces a little at the idea, but Alec is flipping past that one, and several others, some of them nipple piercings, some of them cock piercings, until he apparently finds the one he wants.

The cock in the picture is erect, and is showing the underside. Running up the entire length of the underside of the cock is a line of metal barbells, and Eliot sort of sees why it’s called a Jacob’s ladder. The ends of the barbells are bigger than the ones on Alec’s nipple rings (and round, not triangular, which makes sense) and the little round bead that holds Parker’s ring in place. He can see the outline of the bars through the skin, pressing out against it. He tries to imagine his cock pierced like that, fails, and then tries to imagine how the bars would feel to Alec or Parker, the balls on the ends, moving inside them, and then Parker murmurs, “When you push into one of us with them inside your cock, they’ll move, roll around under the skin, press into your cock,” in a low, sultry voice.

He glances at Alec, who is looking at him, his expression a question, and then turns to look at Parker, who is absorbed in the picture. “This guy only has six,” she says. “You’re long enough for at least eight, easy, depending on the spacing.” There is no doubt from her tone that she thinks that’s a good thing, but even if there had been, the feel from her in the link is warm and excited. She pulls her eyes away from the picture and looks at Eliot. The same question is in her eyes that is in Alec’s, and Eliot looks at the picture again, trying to imagine how it would feel to have the metal inside him, how it would feel for _them_ , and his belly tightens, a low warmth.

And he’d be lying if he tried to tell himself that those were the only things he was thinking of as he looks at the picture. It looks hot. There is something about it that does it for him, the way that it looks does something for him.

Finally he says, “Okay,” and hears his voice come out low and hoarse with a little surprise. He swallows and tries again, but his voice is still a little deeper than it usually is. “I’m convinced,” he says. 

“What…?” Alec says, and then pauses, as though he isn’t sure what question he wants to ask.

Eliot can guess the question though, and he fumbles for an answer. “I can sort of guess how it would feel for you, inside you, and I have to assume that it will be good for me, too, but there is also something about just the way it looks,” he finally manages. “Something about it does something for me. I don’t know if I can explain any better than that.”

Parker gives him a slow look, glances back at the picture, and then looks at Alec. “I don’t think we should wait,” she says.

Alec gives an emphatic little nod.

Eliot blinks in surprise, and tries to think of some kind of objection, but… 

In truth, they’ve got the time right now. The website is newly set up, Alec has finished all the hacking that he can do, and they’ve got nothing going on with Nate and Sophie. It will be at least a day or so before they have to start monitoring the website to respond to the inevitable questions, maybe even a little more than that, while the Daywalkers find it and visit it and hopefully read through all the information they’ve made available to them. There will be a few questions before then, but only a few, because it’s going to take the Daywalkers a while to get through the history and the laws. Parker had condensed the history, but it’s still long enough to take a good chunk of time to get through.

If he’s going to let them do this, why not now?

Eliot can’t think of a good reason other than nerves, and even then, the nerves are fairly mild. He believes that Parker can keep him under her power while she does it, is pretty sure it isn’t even going to be hard for her, as long as he cooperates, so. So there is no reason not to do it now.

“Do we have what you need?” Eliot asks.

“I got everything we would need for it together after the first time we talked about it,” Parker says. “Just so it would be ready if you decided it was okay. But if it’s not okay, Eliot, we’re okay with that. We don’t need this. It will be good for all of us when it’s done, I’m sure of that, or I wouldn’t want to do it, but if you don’t want it, then it isn’t something we’re going to be disappointed about or anything like that.”

“We should still shower first,” Eliot says. “I know the blood healing makes it pretty much impossible to get an infection or anything, but I’ll feel better if we’re all clean.”

“Not a problem,” Parker says, and locks gazes with him. He feels her reach for his mind, and doesn’t resist in any way, just let’s her pull him into her gaze. For a moment, he just feels sort of enfolded and comforted, surrounded by Parker, and then she is projecting something, he thinks a memory, and it’s bizarre because he can feel it almost like it’s happening to him, feel it like he’s Parker, and he’s being fucked and the cock inside her/him is studded with metal which drags and shifts and presses into her, making her buck and writhe. When she lets him go, he sways on his feet for a second, feeling abruptly disconnected and alone in his mind. She grips his upper arm, and the feeling settles and passes.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Eliot says. “That was. I wonder if you could do it during sex.”

Parker laughs brightly. “You could feel it, then?” she asks, clearly excited and pleased. “You could ride the memory of it?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, a little dazed still. “It was like being you, getting fucked. I mean, I felt it like I was you.”

Parker’s face is open with delight. “Think of the things we can let each other feel like that,” she says, beaming.

“I feel like I’m missing out, here,” Alec says, watching the two of them with interest, his curiosity in the link sharp and incisive.

“Show him,” Eliot says, and turns so he can watch Alec’s face. He sees the moment Parker catches him with her gaze, his eyes go a little vacant, and then his face goes dazed with pleasure, Eliot can feel it in the link, can feel him riding Parker’s memory the way that Eliot had, and when he glances down, Alec’s cock is filling, rising almost to half mast, and Eliot doesn’t really miss his twenties, but he kind of misses how quickly he could come and then be ready again afterward. Then he realizes that _he_ is at least half hard as well, maybe even a little more than that, and he wonders again if drinking vampire blood is affecting his refractory period. Or maybe it had just been that hot. His belly is still twisted with desire from riding her memory.

Alec is breathing hard when Parker lets him go, and he absently scrubs a hand across his face and says, “Oh, shit,” sounding both amazed and a little disbelieving. “How did you do that?”

Parker shrugs a little. “I just had the idea that I wanted to show it to Eliot, and tried. It wasn’t even hard,” she says. “I just had to concentrate on the way it had all felt and sort of push it into his mind.”

Alec glances at the picture of the pierced cock on his computer screen, then glances down at Eliot’s half hard cock, and then looks at Parker. “Let me…” he says, and she nods, and he focuses on her, his dark eyes intent, and Eliot can feel his focus in the link, and then a few seconds later, he feels Parker’s arousal jolt through him, and Alec doesn’t hold her quite as long as she’d held him, but when he lets her go, they are both a little breathless, and they are both grinning.

“What did you show her?” Eliot wants to know.

“What it was like to fuck you for the first time,” Alec says, now sounding a little smug. “I don’t think I am as good at it as she is, or maybe I wasn’t concentrating hard enough, because it wasn’t as… as linear, I guess, as hers was. It was more like a highlights reel, the things that I remember really well.”

“Maybe you just need to practice at it more,” Eliot says. “Parker has a better grip on her mental abilities than we do. She has a natural flair for it.” He grins a little. “I’ve been thinking for a while that we should find a way to practice more. Doing it like this is just incentive.”

“Yeah,” Parker says, her arousal still fairly amped up in the link. “I am mostly happy being a girl, but I sometimes wish I could have a dick just for a few days, just to feel what it’s like, and if you can show me like that, even if it’s just the highlights reel, I kind of feel like I almost get my wish.”

Alec closes the picture of the pierced cock on the computer, and taps some keys. Eliot sees the Vamp-Wiki logo on the upper left hand corner of the screen. Alec scrolls down. At the bottom of the page there is a counter. Even as Eliot watches, it rolls one digit higher.

“Well, they’re looking,” Alec says. “Nothing we can do about it but wait for right now.” He looks at Eliot. “Seriously, your cock is amazing. I have a new and possibly endless interest in body jewelry, to the point where I’ve done some investigating as to what else I might like to have pierced, but you don’t have to do a damned thing to make me like your cock more than I already like it.”

Eliot smiles a little. “You’re not making me do anything,” he says. “It’s not just for you. It’s for all of us.” He feels his face go a little hot, and ignores it. “Besides, there is something about the way that it looks that I like. I can only imagine the way that it will feel, but the look of it… does something for me.” He shrugs a little helplessly. “Parker’s memory is part of it, too, but I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it was going to be good for all of us. And the absolute worst thing that happens is that I don’t like it, and we take them out. So. There’s no way to lose, really.”

“Let’s shower,” Parker says. “I really want to do this.”

They all tend to linger in the shower under normal circumstances, but this time they pretty much just tend to themselves, except Alec washes Parker’s back, because one of them always washes Parker’s back. Also, Parker get’s distracted for a minute or so while she’s using one of the handheld shower nozzles to rinse between her legs, which neither Alec nor Eliot object to, because the surprise and pleasure on her face is worth the minute it takes her to remember what she’s doing. She actually blushes a little when she puts the shower nozzle back into its bracket, and says, “It’s probably a good thing we don’t have much more water pressure in here, or I might never leave the bathroom.”

Alec looks thoughtful at that, but Eliot doesn’t ask. If Alec wants to fuck with the shower so that it is designed to get Parker off, he doesn’t really have an objection to it. Though the water pressure is actually really good in here, and Eliot is guessing what Parker would really need is just a little more time to play with the shower nozzle. 

When they’re clean and mostly dry, they make their way back to the bedroom, and Parker gazes thoughtfully at the bed. “I don’t miss much about being involved with Amy, but right now I really wish I had a really good piercing set up.”

She looks at Eliot. “Do you want the cuffs for this?” she asks.

Eliot actually gives the question some consideration, because once he’d become used to using the cuffs, they had become a kind of calming thing for him, something that works on his body and on his head at once in a way that he doesn’t know how to explain. But he isn’t nervous, really, doesn’t feel like he needs that kind of calming.

“I don’t feel like I need them, but if it will make things easier for you, we can use them,” he tells her. “You’re going to use blood to hold my mind, right?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m just more sure of my ability to hold you under the whole time if I use blood.”

“Then either way.”

She goes to her toy closet and pulls out her piercing kit. “I think we’ll go without.” Without comment, Alec shoves the cuffs off the side of the bed. “I’ll want you on your back in the middle,” she says, and sets her kit down on the edge of the bed.

Eliot crawls up onto the bed and settles himself down in the middle of the bed, a pillow wadded up behind his head. “Can I see what you’re going to be using?” he asks. 

Her brows arch a little. “All of it, or just the barbells?”

Eliot has no real urge to look at the needles.

“Just the barbells,” he says.

“I’ve got two sets,” she says. “You can take your pick.” She opens her box and plucks out two plastic bags that clink a little when she moves them. “One set I already had, the other I picked up after we talked about piercing you, just in case you didn’t like what I had on hand. If you don’t like either of these, we can get something else. This doesn’t have to be done today. I’d rather you have piercings you actually like, even if it means we put it off until we can go shopping.”

“Does it really matter that much?” Eliot asks. “With the blood healing, even if we start out with something and later I find something I like better, we can change them out, can’t we?”

Parker smiles a little. “We can, but changing out cock piercings is a little more involved than changing out nipple piercings. Hopefully you’ll like the ones I have enough that it won’t matter.” She brings the plastic bags over and climbs up to kneel next to Eliot on the bed. “Normally I wouldn’t open them first, since they’re sterile, but with the blood healing, infection is not an issue, so if you want, you can get a good look at them.” Eliot looks at the barbells in the bag and then nods and holds out his hand. She opens one bag, tips it, and a couple of silver barbells fall out into her palm. They are bigger than Alec’s nipple rings and Parker’s clit ring, maybe about twice as big around, maybe even a little more than that, and Eliot’s brows arch in surprise. “They have to be big enough for you and your partner to feel them,” she says.

She passes one to Eliot, who looks at it thoughtfully. It’s lighter than he expected, but other than that, it looks pretty much exactly like the ones in the picture Alec had shown them. He passes it back to her, and she drops it and the one she’s holding back in the bag, sealing it carefully before she puts it down. She opens the other bag, and spills one of the barbells out into her palm, her face almost neutral as she hands it to Eliot, but he still gets the idea that this is the set she prefers.

Instead of silver, they are charcoal gray with a metallic sheen. If anything, they are a fraction bigger than the others he had shown him, and the balls on the ends are a little bigger as well. The thing that really grabs his attention, though, is the weight of it in his palm. The silver barbell had been light; this one isn’t exactly heavy, but it’s definitely enough to draw his attention. “Why is this one so much heavier?” he asks.

“It’s surgical grade steel instead of titanium,” she tells him. “It doesn’t make a difference in terms of healing or anything. Both are very safe. The steel just has more heft to it.”

“Why do you like these better?” he asks.

She gives him a rueful little smile. “I want you to pick what you like best for you,” she says. “But I like them better because they’re a little bigger, actually a better size for the width of your cock, which is why I got them, but also because they’ll pull at you a little, and I think that will be good for you.”

Eliot considers the weight of the barbell in his palm and tries to imagine it pulling at the skin of his cock. He can’t, not really. He’s never been pierced, and the only experience he sort of has with this type of piercing is from the other side, from Parker’s projected memory. Lacking any practical information of his own, he decides to go with Parker’s preference.

“These, then,” he says, and hands it back to her.

She smiles a little, and slips the barbell back into the bag with the others. “Alec, can you get me a small glass and fill it with rubbing alcohol. It’s in the toy cabinet.” She glances at Eliot and shrugs. “Just because infection is probably impossible doesn’t mean I don’t want to take every precaution.” She puts the bag of silver barbells back into her kit, and just holds the other bag. “These are a bigger gauge than what I used on Alec, which means a bigger needle,” she says. “You seem pretty calm right now, and I don’t see any reason to screw that up by showing you the needle.”

“I don’t want to see the needle,” Eliot says firmly. “I wish this was something I could get off on, Parker, just so you could get off on me getting off on it, but I’m pretty sure it’s just something I would just end up grinding my teeth and getting through as best as I could without your jedi mind tricks.”

“Honestly, the fact that you’re letting me do it at all is more than I expected, so I’m not complaining,” she says wryly. “I think you’re going to like them, though, Eliot. I really do. I wouldn’t do it at all if I didn’t think that you’d get off on the end result, no matter what we do in between to get you through it.”

“I believe you,” Eliot says, and he does. “And if I hate them, we take them out. No harm, no foul.”

She nods. Alec comes back with a shallow tumbler, finds the alcohol in the toy cabinet, and fills the tumbler about halfway. She takes it from him and sets it on the bedside table. “Once I start, you’re going to have to get up on the bed and hold it for me,” she tells Alec, who merely nods. “Okay, Eliot, spread your legs.” Smiling a little, Eliot spreads his legs, and she slips over to kneel in between his thighs. “Alec you sit up near the top of the bed and hold the glass and the kit,” she orders, and Alec positions himself until she’s satisfied. Then she takes out the barbells one at a time, unscrewing one end off of each of them, and dropping them into the glass. “We probably don’t have to be this careful, but it doesn’t hurt anything to make sure they’re sterile.”

“I’m not worried,” Eliot says, and shrugs a little. “Maybe I should be a little, but I trust you to keep me down until it’s over, and that’s the only part that I don’t want to deal with, so. Do it however makes you comfortable.”

“It’s too bad we couldn’t advertise this kind of thing for a shop,” she says. “Absolutely no pain guarantee. We’d be rich.”

“Parker, dear, you are already rich,” Eliot reminds her.

She waves a hand even as she drops the last barbell into the tumbler of alcohol. “And I don’t like people, so it wouldn’t work out, but Alec would be perfect for it.”

“I’m already rich, too, plus, touching a stranger’s junk is not my thing,” Alec says.

“Okay,” Parker says. “I’m ready to start.” She sweeps her hair to one side of her neck and bends down to Eliot, her bare breasts brushing against his chest. “Drink deep,” she invites.

Just being presented with her bare, spicy scented neck is enough to make Eliot’s fangs drop. He doesn’t hesitate because he’s sure of her, and because he wants to makes sure she knows he’s sure of her. He sinks his fangs into her smooth skin and drinks, her blood familiar tasting and still heady, like drinking strong liquor, and because she had specifically said to drink deep, he drinks until he feels her grasping at the edges of his mind, and he lets her do it, feels thought slip away from him, doesn’t fight her pulling his mind free of his body, and is aware of feeling light, almost weightless, before he isn’t aware of anything else at all.


	46. Chapter 46

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taking some liberties with the safety precautions of piercing here because of fictional flow and because they have super healing powers, so remember not to try this at home this way.

The transition from being under the influence of Parker’s mind control powers to being released from them is like being awakened from a pleasant dream in a leisurely fashion. Eliot’s mind feels like it’s swaddled in clouds that fray gently as he blinks his eyes open, still softening the edges of everything, along with a sense of serene well-being that lingers even after he’s aware that she’s retreated completely from his mind, let his consciousness free, and that he can see the ceiling of the bedroom.

“Are you with us, man?” Alec asks, and moves up from somewhere near Eliot’s knee to his waist, his face familiar and made up of perfect planes and angles, his eyes bright with something Eliot can’t quite name.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, and then swallows, realizing his throat is a little dry, and repeats it. “Yeah.”

“Do you need a drink?” Alec asks, and offers him a bottle of juice, still cold enough for there to be beads of water condensing on the outside of it.

Eliot struggles up onto one elbow and takes it, and drinks down about half the bottle in one long swallow. “Thank you,” he says, and sinks back down into the mattress. Parker scoots upward into his range of vision, though she’s still seated between his spread legs, so that her knees bump up against the insides of his thighs.

“How do you feel? Any pain?” she asks.

“No pain,” Eliot says, and tries to take stock of the rest of his body to see how he feels. He’s aware of the weight of his cock resting against his lower belly, semi-erect, but only because that’s the area of his body he’s really thinking about. “It’s done?” he asks.

“Yep,” Parker says brightly, her eyes gleaming and pleased looking. “Do you want to see?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, struggling up to one elbow again. Alec slides a hand around his upper back and helps him sit up. The shift of his body causes his cock to slide down toward his thigh,and it feels a little strange, a heavier kind of shift, but from this angle it doesn’t look any different. Parker lifts it gently, pressing it up toward his belly, and Eliot can see the first three or so piercings, starting just below the head of his cock and moving downward.

“Get the mirror, Alec,” Parker says, and Alec gets up and disappears into the bathroom. He comes back with the handheld mirror and hands it to Parker. She angles the mirror down, still holding his cock pressed to his belly with just one fingertip pressed against the head, and Eliot stares at the row of barbells running down the length of his cock. There are ten, not eight, which is what he had been expecting, and he blinks a little, trying to process the way they look in his flesh. His first look at them is a little confused, like he’s trying to reconcile the sudden addition of the metal, of the look of them, the round ends, a little bit of the metal rods between the balls on the ends showing. Parker removes her finger from the tip of his cock, and it slides slowly to one side, and that’s when Eliot becomes aware of the weight of them. It isn’t a lot of weight, can’t be more than a few ounces, but he’s intimately familiar with the way his own cock shifts and moves with his body, and the weight of the barbells changes it slightly. That’s also when he starts to get hard.

“I thought I was going to have to do something for that to happen,” Parker says, sounding even more pleased, as Eliot’s cock fills, and he can see that the barbells are perfectly straight and even, as though she’d used a ruler or something to get them right, each the same distance from the one before and after it, from the tip of his cock all the way down to the very base, and he can’t tell exactly what he’s feeling from the barbells as he hardens, but there is definitely something, it definitely feels different, a delicate kind of stretch against his skin, though it isn’t painful or tight feeling, nothing bad, just different feeling, but the difference is enough to send heat rushing to the pit of his belly as he looks at the piercings, and now that he’s filled out, he can only see the balls on the ends, none of the part that actually pierces his flesh.

Parker wraps her hand around his cock and gives it a slow upward stroke, firm, not seeming tentative at all about the piercings, and Eliot feels the pressure against his shaft, but the drag of her hand does something, it makes the piercings running through his cock shift and roll with the motion of her hand, and the feeling sends a powerful jolt of lust and pleasure to replace the simpler warmth he’d felt in the pit of his belly at just seeing them. “Oh,” he says softly, shocked, his whole body seeming to tighten at the sensation, which is part pleasure, but part just _newness_ , some new feeling in a part of him that he had spent the last thirty or so years completely familiar with.

“They look fucking amazing,” Alec says, voice low and rough, a pulse of desire throbbing through the link. It’s enough to ramp up Eliot’s own desire, to send it crackling between the cradle of his hipbones and up his spine, so that he shudders, even though Parker had taken her hand away after that one single stroke.

“They feel… heavy…” Eliot says, though that isn’t what he wants to say, or not all of what he wants to say. He doesn’t know how to describe all of what he wants to say.

“That’s because they’re surgical steel instead of titanium,” Parker says. “It’s heavier, creates more of a feeling of something being there. If you don’t like it, we can switch them out for titanium barbells.”

“No,” Eliot says, more quickly than he means to, and then feels his face heat. “I mean, they’re good the way they are, I like something about the heaviness.” He feels his face go even hotter, and can’t think what to say to make that sound less strange.

Parker’s face goes gentle, however, and she says, “I thought you would. It was just a guess, but, I’m glad it was a good guess.”

“What do we do now?” Alec asks. “Give him a break? Let him adjust.”

“No,” Parker and Eliot both say at the same time. Parker arches his brows at Eliot. “What do you want to do?” she asks.

She’s still holding the mirror, though kind of off to one side now, and Eliot can’t see most of his cock anymore. “Can I see them again?” he asks.

She shifts the mirror in one hand, glances up at him. “Good?”

He nods, and stares at the metal in his cock. The spikes of desire twist in his belly, arcing between his hipbones, crackling up his spine. “Is it safe to… to use them now?” he asks. And then, “I thought you said there would be eight.”

“When I started, I planned to go with eight, but when I was deciding where the second piercing should be, I could see that you could take more. I spaced them how they looked the most appealing to me. If you don’t like any of it, we don’t have to leave them all in.”

“No, I was just curious,” Eliot says, and then asks again, “Do they need to rest or…”

“They’re completely healed,” Parker says. “I did everything while I still had you under. I didn’t want you remembering any part of it as being bad or painful.”

She’s giving him a long, considering look. “What is it you want to do?”

Eliot laughs a little, feeling bemused. “I don’t even know. A little bit of everything. To see, just, how they feel.”

She reaches for the bedside table and grab the lube, drizzling a dollop of it into her palm. Then she wraps her hand around his cock and strokes, her hand a loose fist, but dragging at the fresh piercing, he can feel them moving under his skin, can feel the… the newness of the feeling, like nothing he’s ever felt since he was old enough to pay attention to his cock, and his hips stutter up into her grasp, and he can’t tell if he’s trying to get her to go faster or slow down, so that he can stretch out that feeling.

“Tighter,” he says finally. “But slower.”

She adjusts her grip, squeezing, and then drags her hand up the length of his cock slowly, and then down again, and he can feel the metal inside him moving, shifting, maybe actually spinning, as her hands pull down at the metal of the balls at the ends of the barbells.

“I want to…” Alec says, and he’s staring hard at Eliot’s cock and Parker’s hand, and finally finishes with, “Let me see how he feels.”

Parker drizzles lube into Alec’s palm and releases his cock, and then Alec’s hand is around him, bigger and harder, not quite as tight, as though he’s afraid that he might get it wrong, but it’s just as good, the bars threaded through the base of his cock seem to roll under his skin, and Eliot’s eyes want to roll up into the back of his head.

“One of you should let me fuck you,” he says, when the feel of Alec’s hand on him is not enough or is too much, he isn’t really sure which. “I’m not sure how long I’ll last, it all feels so… I don’t know, it’s different, I can feel the metal moving inside and your hands pulling at the balls on the ends. I want… to try, I want to see how it feels.”

Alec and Parker exchange looks. “You’ll be tighter than I am,” Parker says, almost sounding a little apologetic. “And I’m already wet enough from piercing him that he won’t have to prep me.”

Alec doesn’t argue, but says, “If it works out right, I want you to do the vampire trick on him,” without even asking Eliot if it’s alright with him. Eliot doesn’t argue, because if it works out right, he wants to fuck them both, wants to find out the differences, want’s to know how it feels to shove into Parker’s slick cunt, and also how it feels to work his way more slowly into Alec’s tight ass.

Parker looks at Eliot, who just nods. “I feel like I can’t even say how it feels,” he says, and he looks at Parker, but obviously she’s never felt it, no matter how many times she’s pierced someone elses cock.

“Good though?” she asks, brow slightly furrowed.

“Yeah,” Eliot says hoarsely. “I think so. It’s different, a little strange, but I’m so hard right now, I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“Do you want me to ride you, or do you want to top?” Parker asks.

“Let me,” he says. “I want to be in control. I want to. Can we cuff you, Parker? Like, with all the cuffs.”

She leans back a little, her expression unreadable, but then says, “Yes,” in a firm voice, no hesitation.

She offers him a hand and helps pull him up to his knees, and every time his cock shifts or moves, and just the pull of it between his thighs, it’s all different, heavier, denser with feeling, he doesn’t know how to explain it even to himself.

Parker leans back onto the bed on her back, scooting up so that he hands are close to the headboard, and Alec is already adjusting the length of the straps. Eliot manages to pull his thoughts away from the heavy drag of his cock long enough to work on the thigh cuffs, and Parker spreads wide for him, pulling her legs up high, so that he can judge the length of the straps. His mind is buzzing with sensory input, the newness of it so distracting, that by the time he gets the cuff around her right thigh, Alec is already working on her left, though he hasn’t cuffed her hands yet. He leaves that for Eliot, who pauses and looks at her face, and tunes his attention as tightly to the link with her as he can, but he feels no fear, just a little nerves, but mostly excitement, both for herself, and reeling out for him, she’s excited for him, is sure that he is going to not just like it, but love it, and she’s all anticipation, the cuffs just barely intruding at all. He lifts her right wrist and kisses it, and she smiles up at him. He pulls the leather through the buckle and tight around her wrists, and almost immediately, the little jolts of nerves he can feel from her lessen, like she doesn’t have to feel them anymore once the cuffs are in place. He hurries to get the other in place, and it’s the same, the nerves just sort of disperse, and there is something both wildly arousing and achingly tender turning over inside him, because he feels her trust, knows that the nerves are gone now because of her faith in him, and his chest knots up tight, and then seems to want to burst open with the feeling, the knowing, that she trusts him when he has her like this, open for him and helpless.

“However you want it,” she says. “Fast or slow. Piercing has always made me crazy wet, so I can take it however you feel like giving it.”

Eliot’s breath catches in his throat, he doesn’t know how he wants it, and he can feel Alec’s rolling heat and anticipation, which just makes everything better. He slides the head of his cock against her exposed flesh, feels the catch of the balls of the piercings catching a little against her folds, and eases down to line himself up with her opening. He eases in, just the head, and feels her clench a little around him, and take a deep breath. “It’s okay, Eliot,” she murmurs, warm and certain. “Anything you want is okay.”

Then it’s like he can’t stand not knowing how it will feel, and he surges forward, and she is wet, yes, dripping and slick for him, but still tight enough to drag at the ends of the piercings, so that he can feel them pulling at him, inside him, and he huffs out a hoarse sound, surprise and pleasure and a kind of overwhelmed gasping sound. He thinks for a moment that he’ll slow down, get a better idea of how it really feels, but she arches, hard to do with her legs cuffed, but she does it, and wails out a high and needy sound, and he can’t slow down, can’t stop himself, all he can do is shove into her tight, hot cunt, feeling the drag, the movement _under_ the skin of his cock and pressing up into the flesh of his cock, and it’s fucking amazing, he must always remember to trust Parker, because it’s so good that he’s trembling with it, his whole body quaking, and she is letting out high, short little trills, his favorite sounds that she makes, like the pleasure is so much for her that it draws sounds from her that he’s never heard another person make anything even close to, and he just pounds into her, pausing only once, when she wails out her orgasm and tightens all around him and his cock feels like it’s being wrenched by her body, both inside and out, and he has to stop or he’ll come. He’s aware for the first time that Alec has snaked his fingers between them and is working her clit in sharp, hard little motions, like she likes it, tugging at the golden ring through her clit, and then she shudders out a wordless cry and some of the pressure around his cock abates a little as she relaxes. Then he shoves into her again, and she is trying to arch up into his strokes, her hips twisting like she knows something he doesn’t, and she does, she must, because it ripples against the piercing, pressing them one after another, so that they slide and roll beneath the skin of his cock and at the same time the ends, the balls, slide against the inside of her and catch and jerk and Eliot can feel sweat and need seeping from every pore of his body, and he arches up, getting his knees under him a little higher, and pulls her up with him as high as the cuffs around her thighs will let her go, and takes her like he is sure he’s never taken another person before, not unaware of her pleasure, it’s all there in the link, but for the first time since he’d been old enough to understand to care, more about his own pleasure than about hers, though hers is enough to drive him almost out of his mind, and she chants, “Eliot, fuck, you can do this to me, you can use my body to get yourself off, you can just use me,” and the words ignite in his mind and flare through his body, that she can feel that from him, or that she just knows, and there is no way to doubt her sincerity with the link marks, and _she_ likes it, there is something about it that gets _her_ off, and combined with his own need, it’s more than he can stand, and he does take her, does use her, just feels her tight and wet and perfect around him, and he doesn’t pause this time when she comes again because he’s too close to stop. He just slams into her, the slap of skin on skin, the high trilling sound of her orgasm, he feels like he’s being assaulted somehow, and he cries out, a desperate, helpless sound he doesn’t even understand, the pleasure rippling through his cock, the piercings still tugging at him inside as she squirms around his shaft, dragging it out until his body is jerking and tense and working furiously, and then finally his cock is pulsing, and coming has never been so necessary and so intense and so fierce all at once. 

He crashes down onto his hands and knees when it is over, barely aware enough to keep from just collapsing on top of her, and even still, he is gripping both of her shoulders hard, and isn’t sure how long he’d been holding her like that, something he would normally worry about, but the feel of her in the link is nothing but hot and satisfied and happiness like a drug. He isn’t sure what she can feel from him, but she is beaming up at him when he blinks his eyes open enough to focus on her face, her expression is blissful, peaceful, happiness making her already gorgeous face seem to glow from within.

“Eliot,” she murmurs, her voice tangled around his name as though it means more than just his name, like it means devotion and pleasure and love and certainty, like it means all of that and more things, good things that Eliot is still too stoned from his orgasm to try to identify.

“God, Parker,” he says, and hears himself like an echo, all of those things in his own voice and more, he feels worshipped and worshipful, owned and owning, free and held close and tight.

He bends down and kisses her, and she pants into his mouth, kissing him back with sweet and artless enthusiasm; it feels like the realest kiss he has ever gotten from her, even though he knows that all her kisses had been real, but still it is different, a kind of surrendering to his lips and tongue and teeth that Parker doesn’t usually allow, and he realizes it’s the cuffs, that she had given herself over to him when she’d let him put the cuffs on her, and that she is his in a way that is rare and special for her, and he even understands that this want for her is rare, to give herself over to anyone is a gift, something full of trust, and he feels her bliss and peace and happiness, and he cups her face in his hands and kisses her until his lips feel tingling and unreal, and she is soft and sweet and surrendering beneath his lips as she had been beneath his body. A gift.

He pulls away gently, and she’s looks at him with bright, lucid eyes.

“Are you ready for me to uncuff you?” he asks, and she smiles up at him, and just sighs a little, flexing her wrists in the cuffs.

Then she says, “Yeah, I’m good. That was. Eliot.” She looks like she wants to say more, but he understands her, and that is enough. 

“I know,” he says. “Thank you.”

Her eyes widen a little, like he’s surprised her, and a little thrill jolts through her link, followed by something like relief. “You’re welcome,” is all she says, though, and Eliot kisses her gently again, just a brief brush of lips, and hopes she can feel enough from him in the link to feel that he recognizes her need, understands that it isn’t what she usually needs, and that he will give it to her anytime she lets him, because it was as much for him as it was for her.

Then he uncuffs her wrists -- Alec is already working on the cuff around her left thigh -- and kisses the marks the leather had left on her skin, and she shivers a little, her eyes still lucid as she looks at him, and he’s almost sure that he understands, and will never take it when she doesn’t want it, and will always be willing to give her this when she does want it. By the time he looks away from the peace on her face, Alec has already freed her right thigh, and she slides her legs down so that her knees are hooked over his thighs. He’s still buried in her body. She says, “You’re soft enough now that it shouldn’t matter, but take a little care pulling out. You’ve left me tender.” Her tone makes that clearly a good thing.

Eliot shifts back and pulls out slowly, feeling the balls on the ends of his barbells catching just a little, but she doesn’t show any signs of pain. She just sighs a little when he is finally all the way out, and says, “I always feel a little sad after, like I’m a little less whole without one of you inside me. It passes pretty quickly, but right after, it feels like I’m losing something.” Her tone is low and thoughtful, like she’s wondering about it, about why it is, more than like she’s really talking to one of them.

“That feeling of connection,” Alec says in almost the same tone. “I know what you mean.”

She looks at him and nods solemnly. “But then I can still feel you in the link marks, and it’s better,” she says, her lips curving upward a little. “I barely remember what it’s like to have sex without the link marks. I know it wasn’t like this, this kind of knowing. I feel bad that not everyone gets to know how it feels.”

“We are lucky,” Eliot agrees. “I was always so sure, before I knew it was the two of you, that I wouldn’t want it. That it would be like an intrusion. Thank God I didn’t stay that stupid.”

Parker laughs throatily. “Amen,” she says, and then stretches out across the bed, arching her back, and then collapsing into a pile of loose limbs.

“So, the piercings,” she says. “I obviously can’t know really, because I don’t have a cock, but I do know that they are better for some people than they are for others. They were good for you?” It’s only half a question, but her brows are arched, and it seems like she definitely wants some kind of feedback.

Eliot tries to think of how to describe it. Finally, he says, “I don’t know how to compare it to anything else to try to explain,” he says. “I don’t have any kind of frame of reference, or maybe my vocabulary is lacking. But they feel like a whole new and amazing thing, like a completely new way of feeling something in my cock, which has always been pretty much the same since I learned how to use it, if you get me.” He shakes he head. “I don’t have the right words, but, yeah, they’re. They’re so good.” He cocks his head. “What about for you?”

“I’ve had experience with them before,” Parker says. “But. This was better. It was good before, but this was better than I even would have imagined. I don’t know if it’s because of your size, or the size of the barbells, or the weight of them -- I’ve only ever been with a guy with titanium barbells before -- or if it’s just because it’s you, and the link marks, and… and the cuffs. I can’t pinpoint any one thing. Better than I ever thought they would be, when I asked for them. Lots better.”

“I’m feeling a little left out here,” Alec says, though he sounds mostly amused by it. “I mean, I got some feedback from the link marks.” He sits down on the edge of the bed and leans forward a little, bracing one elbow on one knee. “A lot of feedback, actually, compared to what I usually get when I’m not directly involved. You were both pretty worked up. So, not complaining about that. But, still.”

“It’s supposed to be even better for a guy,” Parker says, smirking a little. “Hands and knees, so that they get your prostate. Or reverse cowboy, if you feel like riding him.”

Alec shoots Eliot an enigmatic look. “I’m sure we’ll be able to figure it out,” he says, one brow arched. “I’ve never tried reverse cowboy. Maybe we’ll hold off on that one until we try something I’m more familiar with.”

“I sort of knew I was going to be the sex show after the piercings,” Eliot says wryly. “I’m just not sure I knew it was going to be as intense as it is.”

“More intense than your vampire sexfriend?” Parker asks.

“Oh, yes,” Eliot says. “Sex with Jairo was good, even great, but I’ve never had better sex than I’ve had with the two of you. I don’t think I ever even imagined sex as good as the sex we have.”

“Me neither,” Parker says. “And I’ve had a lot of different sex in a lot of different ways.”

Eliot remembers taking her to the mansion and the ‘Members Only’ plaque, and because it seems pertinent and he can’t quite seem to help himself, asks, “You were a member, at that place we went to get you pierced?”

“I still am,” she says. “I always will be. But it was just a thing I did when I was trying to figure out how to do normal things between stealing things.” She doesn’t sound worried or bothered, still feels peaceful in the link. “I also went to college. I also learned to knife fight. I also won first place in a national bowling competition. I did a lot of things to try to figure out how to have a life between thief stuff. The thing with Amy at the House--” Eliot can hear that the word house is capitalized, somehow, “--lasted a little longer than most of them because I could be with people who didn’t expect me to be normal. And it was interesting. I hadn’t had a lot of sex before that, and it hadn’t been very good sex, so it taught me things about what I liked and didn’t like, and everyone there only wanted to know… superficial things about you. Like they all wanted to know what I liked to eat and drink, but nobody ever asked me what I did for a living. They all wanted to know what I liked in bed, but nobody ever asked about my past. It wasn’t all just physical intimacy and nothing else, I met a few people that mattered to me, but nobody pushed that kind of personal closeness. It’s a place where people go to leave the rest of their lives behind, and everybody knew that.” She shrugs a little. “But I was never going to really stay. I can’t say it was a phase, because I still like and want a lot of the things I learned to do there. But I never wanted it to keep.” She shrugs again. “And even there, there was stuff I couldn’t make myself do. I couldn’t be with more than one person at a time, or one person I was having a new kind of sex with and one person who told me how to do it. I only went to one of their big… events, and as soon as I realized it meant that people I didn’t know where going to touch me, I left. So. It was just a thing I did for a while.”

Alec is looking between the two of them, obviously a little confused. “It was a kind of sex club,” Eliot says. “Or not a club, but a… I don’t know. Something more exclusive than a club.”

“I could get the two of you in, if you wanted,” Parker says. “So you could see what it is, and maybe try things if you wanted.” Her voice is normal, but she feels a little off in the link. Eliot can’t pinpoint what it is, but even if he had had any interest in the sex club, which he doesn’t, it would have been enough to kill any interest. 

“I’m pretty sure I’m not that interested in the sex club,” he says. “I don’t really do sex with strangers.”

Alec says, “While I’m at least a little curious, I’m not curious enough to actually want to try it myself. Maybe you could tell us stories.”

“I might,” Parker says, smiling again. “And I can either teach you anything we figure out we might like, or get in contact with someone who can talk me through it.”

“You belonged to a sex club and you never got a spanking?” Alec asks, looking genuinely puzzled.

“For the most part, I’m a Dominant.” She pauses, as though considering. “In that kind of environment anyway. It seems to matter a lot less when it’s just the three of us. There were a few times I tried it the other way around, and some of them were good, too, and then it went wrong once, and I never did the submissive thing again. Until you two.” Her smile widens a little. “It’s nice to have options again. And if you want to spank me, I’m willing to give it a go. I know I like some recreational pain, so there’s at least a fair chance that I’ll like it.”

“I think Alec is probably the one who really needs a spanking,” Eliot says, without really meaning to, but it’s true, and once it’s out there, there’s no point in trying to call it back.

Alec’s eyes go wide, but he doesn’t actually object. “Maybe,” he says. “It’s something I’ve done before in a kind of… playful way.” He feels aroused and nervous in the link in equal measure, but Eliot doesn’t think he’s nervous about being spanked. He thinks Alec is nervous about them _knowing_ he might want to be spanked in a non-playful way.

“But what you did before, it wasn’t really enough,” Parker says, not really a question. “Just sort of experimental spanking with a girlfriend, didn’t really hurt that much at all?” That part is a question.

Alec swallows visibly, but just nods.

“Alec,” Eliot says carefully, trying to think out how he wants to say this before he says it. He doesn’t want to use the word ‘submissive.’ It just doesn’t feel right. “Are you more… content being on the bottom?” he finally tries.

Alec glances away for a second, then looks back at Eliot, looking a little defiant. “Yeah. I mean, mostly. Sometimes I want something else, but, yeah. Like, I still want to fuck you sometimes. And I’d still really like to spank Parker’s ass. But.” He shakes his head and takes a deep breath. “Even with that, I like it better when Parker fucks me while I fuck you. And. When I think about spanking Parker, I think about it like it’s something I get to do as a… a reward.” Alec’s nerves have spiked in the link, and he’s looking past Eliot at the wall now. “Like, I do something right, and you _let me_ spank her.”

Eliot looks at Parker. She knows far more about this kind of sex than he does, and he isn’t sure how to reassure Alec that it’s okay. No. Not just okay. That it’s actually kind of hot. In theory, anyway.

“Alec, tell me that you know what Risk Aware Consensual Kink means,” Parker says.

Alec’s mouth twists into a self-deprecating sneer of a smile. “I’m familiar with all the rules,” he says. “I’m a computer genius. And online communities are not that hard to find.”

“Alec,” Parker says in a voice that is both gentle and steely at once, “that is not a specific answer to my question.”

Oddly, the nerves spiking from Alec’s link dial down a notch. Eliot watches as Alec slowly turns his head to look at Parker. “Yes,” he says finally. “I know what it means.”

“Good boy,” Parker says, and Alec’s nerves dwindle and his arousal spikes, just for a moment. Eliot abruptly remembers that happening before, he can’t pinpoint when, but Parker saying ‘good boy’ and feeling Alec spike with reaction. Had he thought it was humiliation? He thinks he had, and now feels a little foolish about it. Not humiliation, but a kind of hunger. Or. Not _just_ humiliation, but a kind of hunger _for_ that kind of response, the kind the elicited both arousal and humiliation. He’ll have to ask Parker about it later. He understands just enough about it to know that he doesn’t really understand it, and without understanding it, it’s better if he doesn’t try to mess with it.

He’ll let Parker catch him up to speed on it later if that needs to happen; for right now, he just watches and waits for Parker to do whatever it is she’s going to do.

“Do you want Eliot to fuck you with his new piercings?” Parker asks, and Alec throws a quick, hungry look at Eliot’s half-erect cock.

“Yeah,” he says, and licks his lips.

“What will you do to get that to happen?” Parker asks, her voice gone low and smoky.

Alec’s attention snaps back to her face, an odd expression on his face, a fierceness and a vulnerability that don’t seem like they should be able to occupy the same face at the same time. “Whatever you want,” Alec says, a little hoarsely, but that arousal had spiked again at Parker’s question, and then spikes again as he answers, coupled with an odd sense of… almost of shyness, like he’s not sure his answer is the right one, or else isn’t sure how he feels about being so open in his offer.

“Then I think Eliot was right. I think you’re the one that needs a spanking,” Parker says, her voice throaty and intent, her eyes on Alec’s face bright with scrutiny.

Alec swallows visibly, throws another glance at Eliot’s cock, and then looks up at Eliot’s face. “Is this freaking you out, man?” he asks, the question coming across as completely genuine in spite of the tone, which is low and laced with want.

“No,” Eliot says truthfully. “I’m not sure what to do right now, but I’m not freaking out. I’m just… out of my depth.”

Alec nods. “I’m just…” he pauses and glances around the room, as though searching for someplace to look that will help him find the right words to communicate what he’s trying to say. “I want some things,” he says finally, and looks back at Eliot. “I want to try them, things I’ve only ever read about and jerked off over. Parker… she knows about some of the things. But I know you don’t know exactly, and I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“It’s not a matter of what I want,” Eliot says. “It’s just that I don’t know. I don’t have the experience to know, and I’ve never felt the need to look it up online and research it. But Parker can teach me, and you can tell me what you want to try, and we’ll work it out. I won’t do anything that feels wrong to me, Alec. Like. I’d be okay spanking you with my bare hand. But I don’t know if I’d want to hit you with a belt or a whip. I’m not saying I wouldn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”

Alec nods again. “I just want you to know that I don’t expect you to do things you don’t want just because I might want to try them. I don’t have any expectations of you.”

“And I’m telling you that I don’t have the experience to be able to tell you if I want a thing until we try it and find out,” Eliot says gently. “It’s okay to have at least the expectation that I will _try_ to do the things you think you want to try.”

“As long as you don’t do anything you don’t want,” Alec insists stubbornly.

“I won’t do anything I don’t want to do, but we don’t have to start with anything I’m not sure about. We can start with things I already want to do to you. You have a great ass, Alec, and I don’t have any trouble wrapping my head around the idea of spanking it. That is not something that worries me.”

Parker is listening to this fumbling negotiation with uncommon patience, her expression a little thoughtful. “We don’t actually need to talk about most of this right now,” she says, lips curved into a little smile. “We’ll have plenty of time to introduce Eliot to kinky sex and find out whether or not it’s something he’s into. Right now, we are only talking about two things, and that’s Eliot fucking you, and you getting your ass spanked, and all three of us are already okay with that. But Eliot won’t be spanking you. I will. Eliot will need a little practice to get it right for you, but I already know how to read a subs reactions, and this will be better for you if I take care of the spanking and leave the fucking to Eliot.”

Eliot knows halfway through that Parker is on the right track, because as soon as she says she’ll be doing the spanking, Alec’s arousal and what still feels like a tangle of humiliation ramps up until it almost overwhelms everything else in the link. Alec’s eyes look a little dazed, but he licks his lips again, and nods, and says, “How do you want me to be?” A hint of shy uncertainty traces faintly around the words, but no fear. A few nerves in the link, but the good kind, the anticipatory kind, and Eliot wonders how long this has been a fantasy for Alec. 

He had been willing to spank Alec, but mostly because Alec wants to be spanked, but something about his reaction, the feel of him in the link and the way he looks, hits Eliot deep in the groin, and he realizes that there is more to it than that, for him. He doesn’t want to _hurt_ Alec, but he does want to try spanking him. There is a deep divide in between what Eliot does in his role as hitter for the team or being a vampire hunter and bending Alec over and slapping his ass. It’s not about violence at all, not really. Eliot can imagine the sound it will make, and he can imagine the heat of the contact across his palm, and he can almost, almost imagine how Alec would respond, and he’s abruptly almost fully hard, his cock shifting with that odd feel of the extra weight of the barbells, and impatient for Parker to get her ass in gear and spank Alec so that Eliot has more than just his imagination to go on, as far as how Alec will respond goes.

“Do you need the cuffs?” Eliot asks, wondering if he wants Alec cuffed when he fucks him.

Alec looks at Parker, looks down into his lap, where his own erection is striving to reach his belly button, and then looks at Eliot. “Not unless she’s going to have at me with her superhuman strength,” he says, smiling a little unsteadily, but still managing to sound wry.

Parker scoffs. “I’m just going to warm you up a little,” she says. “Just enough so that every time Eliot’s hips hit your ass, it stings.” Parker scoots across the bed and takes Alec’s face in her hands, tipping his head slightly and bending to kiss him, a slowly deepening kiss, all lips and tongues, without a hint of teeth. “It’ll be good,” she tells him when she pulls back two inches to look him in the eyes. “I promise. I know what I’m doing.”

“I know,” Alec says breathlessly, and leans into her for a moment, his forehead resting on her shoulder. “How do you want me?”

“Hands and knees,” Parker directs, using her hands to pull Alec gently toward the middle of the bed and position him how she wants him. “You can go down to your elbows if it feels more comfortable for you, but if you go down on your belly, I’m going to be irritated. I know you haven’t thought about it, but when things start heating up, you’re going to want some friction for your cock, so I’m just warning you ahead of time. Stay up.”

Alec’s eyes looks a little wide now, but he nods, stays up on his hands and knees for a few seconds, and then deliberately drops down onto his forearms and elbows. He lets his head hang loose on his neck, his face hidden, and Eliot kind of wants to catch his chin and tip it up so that he can see what it looks like on his face when he gets what he wants, but he resists the urge. If Alec wants to just let his head hang and take it, Eliot is willing to let him do that. This time, anyway.

Parker scoots to one side, her body almost at an angle to Alec’s, and Eliot understands that it will let her put her weight behind each blow, should she so choose, though it will hardly be necessary with the superhuman strength she has going for her. She looks up at Eliot, who is on his knees on the other side of Alec from her. Alec’s ass looks fantastic and defenseless in the position he’s in, and Eliot wants to tell her to get a move on, but reins in that impulse as well. He understands that he’s not quite thinking rationally right now. That sex is clouding his thoughts even more than it usually does with the two of them, or anticipation, or both, but it means he has to make more of an effort not to interfere in something he only theoretically wants to have happen as soon as possible. Parker smiles at him, and he’s sure she can sense his impatience in the link, but she merely strokes a proprietary hand along the curve of one of Alec’s ass cheeks. Alec shivers, his link raw now, needful, while Parker’s, while also needful, is also tightly controlled.

She’s like a vampire like this, like a hungry vampire that knows she could deal damage, and so controls her need tightly. If Eliot wants to do this to Alec, he’ll have to learn the same kind of control. It settles him down a little, draws him a little back with the need to be cautious, but he’s still impatient. He can learn to focus with that kind of control, but he doesn’t need to do that right now. Parker is doing it, and that means he is free to ride the prickle of his own want, and of Alec’s and Parker’s, all the way up to the edge.

“Ready?” Parker asks, though it’s not entirely clear which one of them she’s speaking to. She’s touching Alec’s ass still, her hand caressing, but she’s looking at Eliot. 

Eliot gives a brief, tight nod, trying to tamp down on his impatience. Alec says, “When you are,” not like a dare or a challenge, but like he’s genuinely ready whenever she is, and is willing to wait for it if she’s not. Something about that knots in the already thick pool of heat in Eliot’s belly, and his cock shifts again, that same strange feel of the different weight of it, which is becoming less strange and more erotic.

It’s the sound of it in the room, the echo of the slap of skin on skin that really jars Eliot at first. The sight of Parker’s hand coming down, pale against the dark skin of Alec’s ass is a part of it, the sight of her breasts swaying as she moves, but mostly it’s the sound, louder than he’d expected, and not that different from the sound a fist makes when it encounters flesh. For a moment his desire wavers uncertainly, but then Alec exhales harshly, low and ragged, and his back dips a little, as if offering his ass up for another blow, and that pulls it in the other direction again, away from violence and into different territory, uncharted still, but also still something that sends heat spiraling into his groin. 

Parker goes neither fast nor slow, her hand on Alec’s ass seeming to fall at a particular rhythm or pace that both of them feel, but Eliot can only watch. The sound moves further away from something Eliot associates with violence as Alec reacts to each blow, his breath coming in gasping pants, short, rough cries escaping his lips that Eliot can feel in the link, bright jolts of pleasure, and that he can even see, as Alec shivers and then begins to rock his hips back a little in anticipation of each blow.

Eliot isn’t honestly sure how long it goes on. He watches, mesmerized, as Alec starts to sweat, and then starts to utter soft, breathless profanity in between sounds of pain that sound like pleasure noises, and the rise and fall of Parker’s hand, small and powerful as she uses it to transform Alec. Eliot can see it in the lines of his body, and feel it in the link, so that instead of each blow being a singular spike of pleasure, his arousal slowly evens out, but pulled up, so that it’s all one continuous wave of pleasure, and Alec feels dazed and strung out in the link, like he’s being pulled up a little higher with each blow, but without dipping back down between them. He thinks it’s only a few minutes, but they are curiously warped, while Eliot takes in both the way Alec responds, and thinks that yes, if he could learn to make Alec respond like this, it’s something he wants to do, at the same time that he wonders how it feels to be… to be wound up in this precise way, which is what Parker is doing, she’s twisting him tight like you might twist a rubber band, each turn driving Alec a little higher until he is thrumming with it, his profanity dissolving into open throated little cries along with an almost continuous low moaning, wondering if _Eliot_ would like to be driven onto the cusp of desperation he can feel from Alec, and being completely uncertain, while at the same time feeling a little fascinated at the idea of it, like it might be worth it to try it at least once, just to see, to feel the harshness and the brightness he can sense from Alec.

He isn’t prepared for it to be over when Parker pulls back and strokes both hands down Alec’s as cheeks. Alec shudders all over, making a harsh, pleading noise, and Parker repeats it, but lightly, with her fingernails. Alec groans, and says, isn a slurred and uncertain voice, “Is it supposed to be like this? Am I supposed to feel like this?”

“How is it you feel?” Parker asks him, reaching now for the tube of lube and clicking it open.

“Like it could go on and on,” Alec says, sounding almost dazed. “Like it could go on forever.”

“That just means we’ve got you where you need to be,” Parker says. “If it really did go on forever, you wouldn’t keep feeling that way.” She strokes a hand down his back. “You were a good boy, Alec,” she says, and Alec makes a brief choking sound, and then it sounds like he starts to cry. 

Eliot looks at Parker, alarmed -- still so turned on he can’t reason out what’s going on, but present enough to be alarmed -- and she smiles at him reassuringly. “It’s okay. Alec wants to be a good boy. Those are good tears.” She squeezes lube on two of her fingers and slides them up between the cheeks of Alec’s ass. “They’ll be even better when you fuck him,” she murmurs, and presses both fingers inside. Alec groans out a wet, helpless sound that twists Eliot’s desire into something hard and almost vicious, and he thinks about Alec under him, wonders if he’ll still cry, wonders what it will feel like to have Eliot’s hips slapping against the burn of his spanked ass, and wants to know desperately. He slides forward and holds out a hand for the lube. Parker gives him a quizzical look, but passes it over. She’s moving to pull back when Eliot shakes his head.

“No, keep doing what you’re doing, he says, and slicks up a single finger. She merely shifts slightly to give Eliot room, and Eliot slides his finger in alongside hers, fast and all at once, and Alec lets a a brief, harsh shout, and then it modulates down into a hoarse, panting groan. They open him up together, Parker scissoring her fingers while Eliot finds Alec’s prostate and skates across it with just his fingertip, feather light and teasing.

“Eliot,” Alec begs, and he’s heard Alec beg before, sincerely even, but he’s never heard him sound like this, like he might die if he doesn’t get what he needs, like he’s already halfway to dying from _getting_ what he needs, tone both slurred and a little frantic.

“Does it hurt?” Eliot asks, he has to know, he needs to know how it feels.

“Yes,” Alec breathes, “it feels like my skin is on fire, it’s so good, Eliot, it feels…” He doesn’t seem to know how to finish, and takes several deep, gasping breaths instead of finishing. “Fuck me now. Not much lube, just enough to make it how you want it, but not too much, I want to really feel the piercings, I want to feel them pulling at me inside.”

Eliot wants that, too, desperately, and glances over at Parker. She slides her fingers free of Alec’s body and scoots up toward the head of the bed, sliding between Alec’s head and the headboard. “Lean up,” she says. “Lean against me. Trust me, I know just how to angle you for it to be perfect.”

Alec heaves himself up from his elbows and slings his arms around Parker’s neck, leaning forward against her, his face buried in her hair. “Thank you,” Eliot hears him whisper roughly. “Thank you, thank you.”

Parker strokes her hand down the back of his neck and shifts him around minutely, using her body and hands, and Alec is completely under her control, moves exactly how she arranges him.

“Whenever you’re ready, Eliot,” she says, and Eliot has been ready for long time. He can feel the pull of the piercings, the way they press into the flesh of his cock, and fucking Parker and Alec are different things, neither better or worse, just different, but he has the idea that fucking Alec like this is going to be stupendously good, that Parker has driven him shuddering into a place where the only thing left is his body and how it feels, and Eliot wants to drive him up even further. He touches Alec’s ass with one hand, cupping the cheek of his ass, which is hot, hotter than Eliot had expected, and at the same time pulls his finger free of the tight clench of Alec’s body.

“Do you want the bondage?” he asks, because he doesn’t know if Eliot himself is ever going to want to do this exact thing, but he thinks that if he ever decides to try, he’ll want the bondage.

“No,” Alec rasps out. “Parker has me, just want to be between you, I don’t need it for this, it’s for other things, it’s not important for this.”

Eliot gets the idea that Alec would like to be able to explain the things that it’s important for, but can’t get enough of himself together to try, and is darkly and a little cruelly pleased by it. Eliot cups his hands around Alec’s ass cheeks and squeezes, and Alec moans, then shifts his hands and drags his very short nails down that skin, and Alec wails out a shocked cry, both pain and pleasure, and pants, “Yes, God, Eliot, fuck me, I need it.”

“Say please,” Parker breathes huskily, pressing her cheek against Alec’s cheek, and Alec, unreservedly, begins to plead.

“Please, I need, it burns, my skin is so hot, I want to feel you open me up and feel it when your skin hits mine, I need it, Eliot, please.”

Eliot hears himself say, “Good boy, Alec,” without knowing he’s going to say it until it’s already out, and Alec lets out a low desperate moan.

“Prove it, prove I’m a good boy, reward me,” Alec gasps out, and Eliot swings himself into position between Alec’s spread thighs and lines the head of his cock up with his hole, his whole hand aware of the metal embedded in his cock, which sends a jolting kind of shock through him, and then he pushes forward, slow at first, just to see how it feels as the first of the piercings vanishes into Alec’s ass, and he is tighter than Parker, not as wet, probably Eliot should have used more lube, but Alec had asked for it like this, and Eliot will fucking give either of them anything they ask for, no sense denying it to himself. Alec clamps down around him, groaning, but not pushing back, and Eliot sees Parker has a firm grip around his back and is holding him still, and the piercing feels like it’s dragging through Eliot’s flesh, almost like it’s vibrating, clamped within the heat of Alec’s body, and then he presses forward again, a little faster and harder, and each barbell drags at Alec’s hole as it slips into him, and each time, Alec lets out a short cry of surprise and his need in the link is wide open, not just offering, but begging, and Eliot only makes it halfway in slowly before he grabs the cheeks of Alec’s ass -- Alec screams softly -- and pulls him open and just shoves into him, amazing heat, the tight clench of his body, the way the end of the barbells catch on him inside and drag at Eliot’s cock, and it had been good with Parker, it had been amazing, but Alec is so tight and his hips are twisting, and Eliot knows when the barbells start to drag up Alec’s prostate because he throws back his head, cords standing out harshly on the sides of his neck.

He shouts, “God, oh my God,” and his harsh, desperate need flashes through Eliot, it’s so intense he can almost feel it himself, can almost feel how it feels to him, to have Eliot’s cock inside him, and Eliot, only halfway in, barks out a rough sound of pleasure at the flash of pleasure and shoves forward, each of the piercings dragging at his flesh, rolling under his skin, pressed tight inside Alec.

“Alec, going to really fuck you, going to give it to you hard,” Eliot warns, because even with the link he feels he has to, and Alec just grates out another litany of supplicating words that Eliot wishes he had the attention to absorb, but it’s too much. Alec’s ass is too hot and tight around him, the piercings are dragging all the thought out of Eliot’s mind and focusings it into sensation, the roll and press and drag, and Alec’s cries are rough and harsh, his need like a razor in the link, so sharp that it only further sharpens Eliot’s own need, and he is amazed that ten little pieces of metal should make such a difference, but it does, they do, every movement is rendered more, every press and jerk, every time he pulls out it feels like he’s losing something, and every time he pushes back in, it is like a starburst in the middle of his brain. He feels Parker reach for him in the link, not insistent but present, and without even knowing how he does it, he drags her into it with him, presses the pleasure, the pull, all the ways that it is different, all the hundred ways that it jolts at him and drags at him, and Parker cries out in surprise, and then sinks into it with him, her mind a breath away from his own, close enough that they could share thoughts if there were any thoughts beyond pleasure to share, but as it is, they just ride it, Eliot just rides Alec, and he feels each slap of his hips against Alec’s ass driving Alec upward, and each drag of a piercing along his prostate shocking like an electric jolt, and then Alec is stiffening, whimpering.

“Please, I can’t, I think I’m going to, I can’t stop,” and then he shudders, Parker’s arms still wrapped around him, Eliot’s hands on his hips, and he clenches, the muscles of his ass working around Eliot’s cock so that Eliot throws back his head and cries out at the feel, familiar, because he’s been inside Alec when he’s come before, but foreign with the piercings, the jerk and twist of the metal buried in his flesh, and then Alec is moaning, loud and almost anguished, his hips jerking in Eliot’s hands, and Eliot thrusts into the heat of him, the crushing, pulling twist of his flesh, and in only another dozen strokes is spilling into Alec, feeling his own come force itself out of his body in harsh, spurting jolts, almost aching, it feels so good, he can feel it in the piercings, can feel Alec’s ass still twisting around his cock as he shudders through the aftermath of his own orgasm, and then Alec is loose and limp between them, his ass sinking back into Eliot’s lap even as he leans his chest forward against Parker, and he is trembling, his whole body beset with tiny tremors. “God, Jesus,” he whispers. “Eliot, Christ, I have never done that, Parker did you touch me? I didn’t feel you!”

“No, I didn’t touch your cock,” Parker says, stroking calming hands along Alec’s shivering back. “You coming hands free hadn’t occurred to me, since you never have in all this time. How was it? Would you have rather had my hand?”

“I can’t even tell you,” Alec whispers harshly. “It is all a hot blur, I’m not sure I believed that people even ever really did that without, you know, the biting.”

“We’ll have to see if we can manage it again, see how you like it,” Parker says, still stroking her hands across Alec’s back and ribs. He has his brow resting on her shoulder, his hand twisted into her hair, and is just panting into the hollow of her throat. “So the piercings,” she says, and Alec lets out a little laugh that sounds a little bit like it might be skating the edge of a hysterical sob.

“I hope they were half as good for him as they were for me,” Alec manages finally, thickly.

“I can’t imagine them being better,” Eliot says, and strokes soft hands against Alec’s hips. “Every time you moved, they caught on you and moved with you. Every time you tightened up, they felt like they were rolling under my skin. I. Maybe I can.” He looks at Parker. “Could you feel it.”

“Yeah,” she says, dragging the word out into two purring syllables. “You dragged me into your mind like you were pulling me on a string. I didn’t know you could do it during like that.”

“I didn’t know either. I just felt you there, and held on.” Eliot shakes his head. “Maybe I can show Alec.” He reaches for Alec’s link, a low hum, sated now, and totally peaceful, but Parker shakes her head a little. 

“He’s deep in subspace right now,” she says. “I can feel it, can’t you feel the peace he’s radiating. Don’t show him now. Show him later, when he’s a little more firmly in his own head.”

“Subspace?” Eliot asks, but he kind of knows what it means, can feel it, rolling off of Alec in waves, and he hasn’t heard the term put like that before, but he knows what it means to be submissive, even to feel that way a little, when Parker ties him down sometimes, though nothing this deep and easy, nothing like the feeling he’s getting from Alec.

Eliot slowly, carefully pulls his cock free of Alec’s ass -- Alec sighs a little, as though disappointed, but doesn’t object -- and Parker and Eliot cooperate to ease him down onto the bed on his belly. They settle on either side of him like bookends, stroking their hands down his body, feeling him in the link, sensing his complete contentment, his bliss, and doing what they can to keep him hovering there in that state because they can both feel how much Alec loves it, how he craves it and is grateful for it.

Eliot isn’t sure how long they lie there, with easy hands on each other’s bodies and easy thoughts spilling through their minds. He comes back to himself slowly, and realizes how sticky he is, and considers going to the bathroom to clean up. It’s only when he diverts his attention from Alec’s link that he feels the almost shrill echo of desire coming from Parker, and he looks at her, brows arched, asking silently if he needs to do anything about that.

“It’s just my reaction to his reaction,” she says, shaking her head back a little to spill her hair out of her face. “I’m mostly a dominant. Being able to feel his headspace is just something I react to. Being able to do this to him turns me on. I can’t help it, it’s just the way my mind and body work. But it will fade in a while. You don’t have to do anything about it.”

“But why shouldn’t I?” Eliot asks. “If you want, and I can, why shouldn’t I?”

She cocks her head a little, looking thoughtful, but then she just shrugs. “I like being here almost as much as he likes being there. I’ll save it up, and bring it out next time he’s feeling submissive.”

Eliot doesn’t really understand, but he’s willing to take her word for it. “The piercings,” he says, and shifts his hips just enough to feel his cock move, that added weight, that strange but erotic awareness of the metal buried in his skin. “They’re…” but he doesn’t have the right words for what they are.

She smiles like she understands completely. “I knew you’d like them. And you have the perfect cock for them. Thick and straight and long enough to take enough for a solid ladder. I knew I’d like them. I’ve been with guys before with them. I was pretty sure Alec would like them. They are made for prostate stimulation. But mostly I was sure that you’d like them. That you may not know enough about the kinky stuff to know how you feel about it, but that certain things will really work for you, and this one was one of them. Pain is never going to be a thing for you. Well. Big pain. You might like to get your ass spanked or experiment with a little bit of cock and ball torture, but you’re built for pleasure. Everyone is different. But I still think you’re going to find out that you can dish out a little pain and enjoy it. Maybe more than just a little, once you see how it works. But we’ve got time. There’s no hurry.” She strokes a hand across one of Alec’s ass cheeks, and he shivers, but doesn’t object. “This one is going to like some of the big pain.”

“What about you?” he asks.

“I honestly don’t know, Eliot,” she says, frowning just a little. “I’ve only got experience with the bondage part of bondange and discipline from the other side. No one ever hit me. But. I’m not going to pretend the idea of getting a spanking from one of you doesn’t interest me, at least academically. And after the clit piercing, I’m fairly willing to try out needle play. And the double penetration… that hurt. It was good, don’t doubt it for a moment, but it hurt, too, and it was very very good. So. We’ll just have to take the time to try a little bit of everything.”

“I’d let you spank me,” Eliot says, and feels his cheeks heat. “I won’t swear I’ll like it, but watching you do it to Alec was… enough to interest me. But I’d want the bondage.”

She gives him a long look. “Yeah, I can see how that could work for you. You don’t really let go in your mind unless you’re physically helpless. And even then, I’ve only seen you dip down into it, not really let it subsume you. We’ll see how it works out.” She shrugs. “The link marks make everything possible.” Her eyes glitter a little. “How it felt to feel you pounding into him. We’ll have to practice that on each other, piggybacking like that. Wouldn’t you like to know what it feels like to have Alec go down on me?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, without having to think about it. “I’d like to know what it feels like to get to have multiple orgasms, too.”

She laughs. “Let’s get Alec into the bath, before he starts getting too sticky for it to be good,” she says. “Go run the jacuzzi, I’ll get him moving.”

Eliot is feeling sticky enough himself not to argue it, and rolls off the edge of the bed to his feet, making his way into the bathroom and turning on the water for the jacuzzi, checking the temperature carefully before he just lets it run and ducks into the shower for himself, scrubbing himself clean and then letting his hands explore the new metal in his cock. The piercings are closer together when he’s soft, but he can feel even more of the weight of them, which makes his cock twitch a little even though he is absolutely spent for the moment. It occurs to him that his days of going commando are probably well and truly over. It’s not like he’d done it all the time, but it had never bothered him to do either, but with this extra weight… and with the way his cock seems to want to be at least semi-erect because of it… he’s probably going to have to make sure he’s got plenty of support.

He hears Parker coaxing Alec into the jacuzzi and the water shut off. When he gets out of the shower, they are both lounging against the slanted back of the big tub, Parker behind Alec, one arm wrapped around his chest as though to support him. Alex gives him a sweet and sleepy kind of smile as Eliot towels off, and Eliot leans down and kisses him easily, without any real heat, just to kiss him.


End file.
